24 MASSACHUSETTS HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



the nature of the plant to produce tubers. A cabbage left to it.self 

 would run to a seed stalk, but we cultivate it for its head alone, 

 which is an aggregation of leaves that are very palatable as a food 

 for man, but quite exhaustive of the soil. As we have changed the 

 nature of most of our cultivated crops, so we must cliange our 

 methods of cultivation, and especially our methods of feeding them. 

 The old method of relying wholly on stable manure, raw or com- 

 posted, waiting on the slow processes of nature to render it available, 

 must give way to cpiicker and surer methods for the commercial 

 farmer and gardener of today. 



Intensive Agriculture in Europe. 



"About the middle of the last century, a lighthouse known as 

 Dunstan Pillar was built on Lincoln Heath, in Lincolnshire, 

 England. It was erected to guide travelers over a trackless, barren 

 waste, a very desert, almost in the heart of England; and long it 

 served its useful purpose.' The pillar, no longer a lighthouse, now 

 stands in the midst of a rich and fertile farming region, where all 

 the land is in high cultivation. For many years, no barren heath 

 has been \isible even from its top." Such is the story told by the 

 veteran agricultural chemist, Prof. Johnson, of Connecticut, to 

 which the late Prof. Atwater adds: "Had not chemists busied 

 themselves to find out what makes plants grow, and had practical 

 farmers not been ready to use their discoveries, Lincoln Heath 

 would perhaps still remain a waste. What is true of this bit of 

 English soil is true in greater or less degree of wide areas of our 

 OAvn and other lands." 



Prince Kropotkin, in an article on "The Coming Reign of 

 Plenty," writes: 



"If we want, however, to know what agriculture can be, and 

 what can be grown on a given amount of soil, we must apply ^f or 

 information to the market-gardening culture in the neighborhoods 

 of Paris, Amiens, and other large cities in France and in Holland. 

 There we shall learn that each hundred acres, under proper cultiva- 

 tion, yield food not for forty human beings, as they do on our best 

 farms, but for 200 and 300 persons; not for 60 milch cows, as they 



