AGRICULTURE ON CLIMATE. 183 



the native prairie grasses of Kansas and Nebraska ; and the 

 further west these are extensively cultivated in those States, 

 and the greater the area of barren lands brought under culti- 

 vation by means of irrigation, the more will the "rainless 

 desert " of the early explorers be visited by the verdure- 

 making clouds. 



Here in New England we all know how difficult it is to 

 keep up the fertility of our soils, and how rapidly farms run 

 down under unfavorable circumstances. It is a hard neces- 

 sity that compels us to consume all the coarser products of 

 the farm on the farm itself, — all the hay, grain, roots, etc., 

 we take so much pains to garner into our barns and cellars. 

 But a fertile soil, the world over, is the result of similar 

 causes and is subject to the same laws, and we may regard 

 the United States as one huge farm, with its hundreds of 

 millions of acres, its soil subject to the same laws as any 

 one of our New England fifty-acre lots. Remembering this, 

 let us see what America is doing with her large fai*m. 



During the last fifty-eight years she has exported more 

 than 2,000,000,000 bushels of wheat, and of corn more 

 than 1,000,000,000 bushels; and she is increasing the 

 amount per annum at a most astonishing rate. In the ten 

 years ending 1882 she exported to England, France and 

 Germany more than $6,000,000,000 worth of agricultural 

 products. This represents the total exhaustion of 260,000 

 acres of land annually. ^VTiat has she imported to supply 

 the waste of fertility by this enormous agricultural exporta- 

 tion? A few cargoes of guano and some Gennan salts, but 

 little compared with the waste. 



But the exportation of agricultural products is not the 

 only way by which America is impoverishing her farm. A 

 large proportion of our population is found in cities and 

 towns of over 10,000 inhabitants, and most of the food con- 

 sumed therein is as much lost to the soil as if exported. 

 Our cities — New York and its environs, with two and one- 

 half millions of inhabitants ; Philadelphia, with its one mil- 

 lion — and other cities are huge monsters, living on the fer- 

 tility of the country and pouring what they should return to 

 the soil into the ocean through their herculean water-ways. 



Of wheat, there was raised the past year over 500,000,000 



