POTATOES. 



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In vegetables, experiments may generally be made 

 on a small scale, which, if properly conducted, would 

 be as fair tests, and lead to as correct conclusions, as 

 though acres of land and hundreds of dollars had been 

 put at risk. Some people never experiment at all. 

 They fancy or " guess " that some things are better 

 than others, and thereupon they adopt them, and con- 

 tinue forever to use them, without ever knowing 

 whether the articles are comparatively profitable or 

 not. A man takes it into his head that some substance 

 — lime, ashes, bon-e dust, plaster of Paris, or something 

 else — is a valuable manure, and he goes on to use it, 

 but in such a manner that he cannot tell what its 

 effects are. He uses the same substance for the whole 

 field, and he cannot tell how much of the crop is to be 

 credited to the manure ; and, of course, he does not 

 know how much the manure is worth. If he had used 

 some other kind of manure on a part of the field, and 

 had left a part without any manure, the soil being of 

 a similar quality, he could easily have told, by calcu- 

 lating the proportional yield of each part, which was 

 the best manure, and what each was really worth. An 

 experiment of this kind would have been attended 

 with little expense, and the results would have been a 

 good guide for the future. We once knew a man who 

 was in the habit of using considerable lime on his land 

 every year, as he thought to profit ; till, by making an 

 experiment, he ascertained that the increase of his 

 crops had been attributed to a wrong cause. Many 

 people, when they see a large animal or a large vege- 

 table, are led at once to consider that the race or varie- 

 ty to which it belongs is uncommonly valuable, without 

 stopping to inquire how much ground it occupied, or how 

 much labor and expense attended its production. Now, 

 in all these things, profit should be the criterion. 

 The value of animals should be reckoned by the amount 

 of meat, &c. afforded in proportion to the food con- 

 sumed ; and the value of vegetables by the sustenance 

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