THE SOIL OF NEW ENGLAND. 81 



Alps, and bring up their children on giddy cliffs where none 

 beside, but the chamois, climb ; and in some places in Italy, the 

 women carry up soil in baskets placed on their heads, to form 

 terraces on the sides of the mountains.. It embraces sandy 

 plains ; but the plains of Belgium were sandy, but by the appli- 

 cation of agricultural science, this sand, once almost as unprom- 

 ising as Cape Cod, now sustains a population sufficient in 

 numbers to quash the theory of Malthus. • 



In draining a marsh, we add to the available surface of the 

 world. The Duke of Devonshire, who drained the Bedford 

 Level, and the Emperor of France, who* drained the marshes 

 of Salone, were public benefactors. Much of the soil of New 

 England is undrained, cold, vinproductive, wet, insoluble. But 

 these marshes are magazines of humus ; rich mines which the 

 rivulets have carried there from the decaying leaves of centuries 

 of vegetation, rich as the most fertile soil of the West, but now 

 the abode of reptiles, bearing nothing but coarse grass, and 

 none of the constituents of the blood, to produce which, Liebig 

 says, is the true object of agriculture ; nothing to support 

 animal life ; nothing of the iron, phosphorus and gluten of the 

 human frame-work ; nothing to support the brain which moves 

 the world. It is in this, that '' Man may be called to be a 

 co-worker with the Infinite Mind ; " a promoter of the great 

 plan, which was commenced when God separated the waters 

 from the land. The noble consciousness of this power over the 

 soil, >vhich is little short of that of creation ; the feeling that 

 one has made land do its share toward the support of civiliz- 

 ation, renders the making of soil thus easily, infinitely better 

 than the seeking it ready made. 



Tlie soil of New England is hilly and stony, thin and sandy ; 

 but it has. done its fair share toward the agricultural reputation 

 of the nation. There arc better farmers in New England 

 to-day, than in more favored portions of the country. They are 

 not generally men of one idea. The various kinds of crops 

 their farms produce, drive them out of that, and they generally 

 know more or less of the theory of rotation of crops, deep and 



♦While in exile, the Emperor was asked why he paid so much Mention to 

 the study of books on draining. " I am fitting myself to become Emperor of 

 France," said he, "and one of my first acts shall be to drain tiie marshes of 

 Salone," and so it was. • 



