AGRICULTUEE ON CLIMATE. 175 



In Egypt a similar condition has been reached. The val- 

 ley of the Nile, so far as its annual inundations have 

 enriched the soil, has continued in a state of unrivalled 

 fertility ; but beyond this, all is barrenness. As Whittier 

 says, " The sphinxes question the centuries from their veils 

 of sand ; " and as a noted traveller says, in speaking of 

 the pyramids, " The silence of the desert triumphs where 

 reverent pride made its proudest displays," The world- 

 renowned remains of immense cities, of those marvellous 

 proofs of human labor found in the pyramids, sphinxes, 

 obelisks, catacombs and temples, far exceeding in extent 

 anything to be found in Greece or Rome, testify of a coun- 

 try, fertile and populous, outside the narrow bounds of the 

 inundated valley of the Nile. 



This wide desolation in Assyria, Babylonia and Egypt is 

 now generally admitted to have been caused by a bad system 

 of agriculture, — taking everything from the soil and return- 

 ing nothing to it. 



As an illustration of the little value placed on fertilizers 

 even in later days may be mentioned the fabled cleansing of 

 the Augean stables by Hercules, — who seems to have been 

 the inventor of the modern system of sewage, — where the 

 accumulations of 3,000 cattle for 30 years is said to have 

 been washed into the sea in a single day. This, if the event 

 could have occurred, would represent a loss of more than a 

 million dollars' worth of plant food. To produce without 

 manure the amount of food required for those cattle would 

 totally exhaust 10,000 acres of our ordinary New England 

 soil. Authentic instances may be found in ancient history 

 where too great exhaustion of the soil has been followed by 

 barrenness and a decrease of population, notably in Pales- 

 tine, Asia Minor and Persia. Reference to these is enough 

 for our purpose. 



Some years since, in a discussion before the West New- 

 bury Farmers' Club, a member from Newburyport, T. K. 

 Bartlett, stated as within his own knowledge that on some 

 portions of Grasshopper Plains, so called, where was once 

 good corn land, the soil had been so exhausted as to leave 

 only shifting sands. 



In my own neighborhood is a portion of a pasture that 



