CHAPTER IX 



FINDING AND MAKING SOIL 



ABOVE everything else Nature tries to make 

 soil, and this, you may be sure, is what you 

 will have to help her do, if you make a 

 prosperous country home. Soil is by no means a 

 " fixed quantity," as one of our recent text books 

 tells us; on the contrary, soil elements are constantly 

 being turned into soil, and soil turned back into its 

 elements out of reach of us. In summer Nature 

 weaves an immense quantity of foliage, out of the 

 air mostly, and then in the autumn throws tons of 

 leaves down upon the earth to make, first, humus and 

 then soil. 



Fools burn leaves, leaving for themselves a pinch 

 of poor ash, but sending back into the air what was 

 taken from it by the process of growth. These 

 thousands of tons are not made out of the earth but 

 out of the air and are intended to be turned over 

 into soil. If you plant a tree in a tub of dirt and 

 leave it there until it weighs one hundred pounds, 

 you will find, by weighing the dirt, that the tree was 

 not made up of what was in the tub, but almost alto- 

 gether of what it could get from the air carbon 



193 



