MUCK AND SAND. 135 



in hauling out a great mass of this material, and spreading it 

 upon our soil, Av^ith the expectation that it will act as a fertil- 

 izer alone. Not at all. When my old friend, Horace Gree- 

 ley, with whom, towards the close of his life, I am sorry to 

 say, I differed on very many questions, asserted that he had 

 fertilized a sand-bank at Chappaqua by simply placing the 

 contents of an old pond-hole upon it, and had made that 

 sand-bank produce a good crop of timothy hay by the use of 

 this muck, all the answer I had to make to him was, that he 

 had combined by the muck and the sand artificially what na- 

 ture often combines in the manufacture of her best soils ; but 

 that when the immediate influence of that was over, he would 

 be obliged to return at once to the use of animal excrements 

 or some other fertilizer. 



So I would use muck on sandy land, and if I had clay 

 lands to manipulate, and rye-straw was expensive, I would 

 use sand. I represent a clay farm ; almost all the land I cul- 

 tivate is of that chai-acter. When I took it into my hands, in 

 1857, it had been mucked to death ; it had been filled with 

 muck ; muck was convenient ; muck was popular ; it had its 

 advocates, and was accepted, as a good many other thino\s are 

 accepted, because no one exposes their true value. Tl\is 

 land, I say, had been mucked to death, and having accident- 

 ally discovered a large deposit of sand in the rear of my sta- 

 ble, I resorted to that sand for the bedding of my cattle and 

 the enlargement of my manure-heaps. The land changed in 

 three years materially. The quality of my crops changed ; 

 half-grown, stunted mangold-wurzels were replaced by large, 

 healthy-looking roots. Tufted grasses, — that is, fields where 

 there would be a square foot of grass, and six inches inter- 

 vening of barrenness, — were all .wiped out, and an equal 

 diffusion of healthy, thrifty grass was secured in its stead. 

 It was owing to the introduction of sand with the manure in- 

 to those lands that had been rentlered sour and pasty by the 

 muck. That was the result of that experiment. So, I say, 

 if you have clay lands, extend your manure-heaps and com- 

 post them by the use of sand. 



Now, you may say, What do you compost your manure 

 at all for? Why do you not haul your barn-yard manure 

 directly upon the laud; and why bed your cattle at all? 



