L. V. BELL'S ADDRESS. 591 



our arrangements will be made to prevent waste into earth, 

 ocean or air. In many of our best farming establishments, 

 nothing which can enter into vegetable composition is suffered 

 ever to fail of its appointed purpose. Nor are the means to 

 accomplish this complex or costly. Upon the small farm, con- 

 nected with the institution where I reside, and which contains 

 less than thirty acres under cultivation, the annual average 

 profit, as known by a rigid system of book-keeping, charging 

 everything which goes upon it of labor to its debit, and its 

 products to its credit, at the same rates at which the balance 

 of similar articles is purchased, has proved to be about ^1,400 

 a year, for the last fifteen years. That no exhaustive process 

 is going on, is evident from the fact that the last half has been 

 better than the first half of this period. This result is entirely 

 ascribed to the care with which every ounce of residuum of 

 nearly two hundred and fifty persons, solid and liquid, is re- 

 turned to reproduce the crops. A judicious system of sewers, 

 of manure cellars, of sheds, where the effects of time may be 

 availed of in decomposition of manures, and in killing the 

 seeds of most weeds which can be thus destroyed, and of ad- 

 ding vegetable growths from the marine marsh, and pulverized 

 gypsum to prevent atmospheric absorption, account for so un- 

 usual a degree of success. I speak of it with praise, freely, 

 because the management has been not in mine, but in more 

 experienced and practical hands. 



The grand organic and inorganic portions of the earth's 

 crust are not in danger of being rapidly lost, even if no replace- 

 ments were made. Let any man dig up an average cubic foot 

 of soil in his tillage land, dry it thoroughly, weigh it, then burn 

 out as much as he can, leach what is left and deduct the bal- 

 ance, and he will attain to an approximation of the quantity 

 which is or may be actually food for plants. He will not get 

 the whole, because, as we have seen, vegetables have the 

 power of dissolving and appropriating what is flint or sand or 

 other insoluble element, which can be neither burnt out nor 

 lixiviated. But let him disregard this, and multiply the or- 

 ganic matter he has thus discovered, by the depth of his soil 

 and the number of his acres, and he will be amazed at the 

 millions and millions of pounds of absorbable food for plants 

 he owns. Weighed against corn or potatoes, and he will be 



