CROPPING AND MANURING. 187 



compared to the quantity which is taken from it by crop- 

 ping. New or virgin soils may contain a large supply 

 of vegetable matter, or humus, or soluble geine, terms 

 which mean much the same thing, or they may contain 

 an abundance of the specific food of certain plants, as of 

 VN^heat, for instance, enough to feed several successive 

 crops ; yet the powers of fertility are diminished by ev- 

 ery succeeding one, if the crops are carried off from the 

 field, and nothing returned to it to supply the loss, — until 

 finally, if the system of cropping goes on in this way, 

 the food of plants will become exhausted, and the land 

 sterile and barren, for all the profitable purposes of hus- 

 bandry. If we look to the old continent, we shall per- 

 ceive that large districts, once fertile and populous, have, 

 by the injudicious management of the husbandman, be- 

 come almost waste and depopulated. A great portion 

 of Egypt, of India, of Asia Minor, of the Barbary 

 States, and of Spain, which once sustained their millions 

 of inhabitants, and were to the world examples in the arts 

 of culture and civilization, may be cited in illustration of 

 this fact. And if we will turn our eye upon the Atlantic 

 border of this new continent — new at least in culti- 

 vation and improvement — we shall see ample evidence 

 of the melancholy tendency of the old, the exhausting 

 system of husbandry. We shall see millions of acres of 

 once fertile lands, formerly in as high repute as the El 

 Dorado of the west — the land of promise — worn out and 

 exhausted of their fertility, by the old wretched system of 

 cropping, cropping, cropping, until they have been thrown 

 into " old fields ^'^^ or commons, as unworthy of culture. 

 And even in the fertile west, from the abuse of those 

 who are charged with their culture, are the lands in some 

 districts assuming the garb of old age and unproductive- 

 ness, and their occupants are passing further west, to seek 

 out and exhaust the patrimony destined for coming gen- 

 erations. 



If we put an ox to a stack of hay, he may subsist upon 

 it a longer or shorter time, according to the quantity of 

 food which it contains. A constant diminution of his food 

 is going on ; and although he may feed and fatten till the 



