90 MASSACHUSETTS AGRICULTURE. 



and considerable necessity in the conrse tliat has been pursued. 

 Subsistence is the first desire ; and in new countries where 

 forests are to be felled, dwellings erected, public institutions 

 established, roads and bridges built, settlers cannot be ex- 

 pected, in the cultivation of the land, to look much beyond the 

 present moment. And they are entitled to the original 

 fertility of the soil. Europe passed through the process of 

 settlement and exhaustion many centuries ago. Her recovery 

 has been the work of centuries, — ours may be accomplished iu 

 a few years, even within the limits of a single life. The fact 

 from which an improving system of agriculture must proceed, 

 is apparent in the Northern and central Atlantic States, and is, 

 in a measure, appreciated in the West. We have all heard 

 that certain soils were inexhaustible. The statement was first 

 made of the valley of the Connecticut, then of the Genessee 

 country, then of Ohio, then of Illinois, and occasionally we 

 now hear similar statements of Kansas, or California, or the 

 valley of the Willamette. In the nature of things these state- 

 ments were erroneous. The idea of soil, in reason and in the 

 use of the word, contains the idea of exhaustion. Soil is not 

 merely the upper stratum of the earth ; it is a substance which 

 possesses the power, under certain circumstances, of giving up 

 essential properties of its own for the support of vegetable and 

 ultimately of animal life. What it gives uji it loses, and to the 

 extent of its loss it is exhausted. It is no more untrue to say 

 that the great cities of the world have not, in their building, 

 exhausted the forests and the mines to any extent, than to say 

 that the annual, abundant harvests of corn and wheat have not, 

 in any degree, exhausted the prairies and bottom lands of the 

 West. Some lands may be exhausted for particular crops in a 

 single year; others in five years, others in ten, while others 

 may yield undiminished returns for twenty, fifty, or even a 

 hundred years. But it is plain that annual cropping without 

 rotation, and without compensation by nature or art, must 

 finally deprive the soil of the required elements. Nor should 

 we deceive ourselves by considering only those exceptions whose 

 existence is due to the fact that nature makes compensation for 

 the loss. Annual or occasional irrigation with rich deposits, — 

 as upon the Nile and the Connecticut, — allowing the land to lie 

 fallow, rotation of crops and the growth of wood, are so many 



