No. 4.] NUTRITION. 61 



There is a certain phase of truth in this. I read in one of 

 that strange Russian's ai-ticles, Prince Kropotkin, that the 

 most prolific soil in Europe is to be found in the market 

 gardens around Paris, where tenants resting a few years upon 

 a bit of absolutely l)arren land or rock first make their soil, 

 then make their crops, and then go on to make more soil for 

 sale ; holding their title for the time to building land on 

 conditions which may enable them to remove the whole of 

 their made soil when their tenancy ends. 



I imagine that the most prolific soil in Massachusetts is 

 to be found under the acres of glass in Arlington and 

 Belmont ; and I doubt if there are acres anywhere in this 

 country yielding a larger if as large an amount of nutrition 

 as these acres do. If there are others, they are of the same 

 type in the neighborhood of other great cities ; yet no man 

 knows or would be rash enough to measure the potential in 

 production of any single acre anywhere. 



We hear of abandoned farms in Massachusetts and other 

 parts of New England. Their very abandonment is an in- 

 dication of the progress of agriculture in the same States ; it 

 means a transfer of energy to better positions for production. 

 There are more abandoned farms in old England to-day than 

 there are in New England, but for an entirely different 

 cause. The abandoned farms of old England are in the 

 highest state of cultivation, and of a high potential in their 

 natural properties ; but they are abandoned because our 

 English cousins have not yet learned how to free the land 

 of artificial conditions, or how to promote the progi-ess of the 

 laborer to the end that he may become an independent 

 farmer. 



If there is one conspicuous diflerence between this and 

 other nations, it is waste. This waste is largely to be at- 

 tributed to crass ignorance. It is only within very recent 

 years that the waste of farmers upon farms, of millers in 

 flouring mills, of packers of meat and of all who deal with 

 the products of the soil has ceased to be most conspicuous ; 

 in many directions it has not yet ended. For instance, in 

 the first pamphlet which I ever printed, entitled " Cheap 

 cotton by free labor" (1861), I laid out theoretically and in 

 advance the whole progress and value of the cotton-seed in all 



