82 SHEEP HUSBANDRY IN THE SOUTH. 



Experience has shown tliat if vegetables of different classes are made to 

 follow each other, the soil will much longer retain its productiveness.— 

 Even when " exhausted" of some one or more of those ingredients necen- 

 6ary for the healthy production of a particular plant, it is found to produce 

 others luxuriantly which do not require the lacking ingi-edients, or hut very 

 minute portions of them And, by a most beautiful arrangement of plijB- 

 ical causes and effects, when a plant is removed fiom the soil, and not wit h- 

 •itanding its place is occupied by others, a process of restoration at once 

 commences to replace all that the absent plant has appropriated, and to 

 prepare the kindly bosom of the earth again for its reception. Nature 

 herself, in ministering to this beneficent end, becomes a great laboratory' 

 and in 1 ^r most ordinary, as well as her most unusual operations, she i-« 

 constant./ producing those chemical changes, and furnishing those chem- 

 ical ingredients, which I'estore what has been abstracted by man's cupid- 

 ity, or lost by his improvidence. The gentle rain brings down ammonia 

 and carbon to plants. The frost rives the solid rocks, to disengage their 

 fertilizing constituents. The sun, in his flaming path, looks down not only 

 So warm and give us light, but tc^ perform functions in the vegetable econ- 

 omy without which all herbage, except a fiew miserable fungi, would per- 

 ish; and to all he imparts their varied and beautiful coloring. The thun- 

 der which shakes the walls of cities, and strikes man with awe, brings to 

 our aid one of the most efficient promoters of vegetation. Even the burst- 

 ing volcano converts its fiery crater into a crucible and retort, and gives 

 off that gas which forms so large a portion of all the vegetable and animal 

 productions -of the globe : and the wild winds, which strand navies in their 

 course, equally diffuse it over the earth. 



It follows from the above positions that naturally good lands* which are 

 more or less exhausted will be gradually resuscitated by " rest," or an en- 

 tire exemption from tillage ; and hence the absurd idea that lands require 

 physical " rest," in the same sense in which the tired animal muscle re- 

 quires it, after continuous exertion. But, apart from the theciy, the prac- 

 tice of '* resting" lands is inexpedient, foi the following reasons: If a 

 plant is not continued on a soil until it consumes any of those inorganic 

 constituents necessary to its production — if, on the other hand, it is suc- 

 ceeded by a plant which makes its heaviest drafts on those inorganic sub- 

 stances which its predecessor required the least of, and vice versa— thti 

 natural recuperative process above adverted to, aided h?/ means which lost 

 to us none of the value of the crops, will repair the waste made by each 

 plant, before it again occupies the soil, in a judicious rotation. Hence, by 

 a rotation of crops, fertility can be indefinitely sustained, and the earth 

 each year return its increase. Thus the ends of "rest" are attained, with- 

 out its great and unprofitable sacrifices. 



To sustain the fertility of the soil, some portion of the crops of every 

 rotation must be converted into manure. These are the " aiding means" 

 above alluded to. They may be conveited into green or animal manure 

 ff the former, the whole crop is plowed under. If the latter, the crop is 

 •irst partly converted into animal manure, by animals depastured on it, and 

 than this animal manure, with the remaining vegetation, is plowed under. 

 The last is always the most economical method, on good lanc3,t becauje 

 the crop is worth almost as much for manure, after 2^o,ssing through the 



♦ I sny "naturnlly sood lands," for those entiroly deficient in several of the necessnry lonstinienti ol • 

 lerile soil misrht require ages of rest to obtain these constjruents— if, indeed, they ever would, by mcfely 

 Batumi causes. 



t I have limited the assertion to " pood lands," because a crop of creen manure, turned under at tba 

 proper stage of its irrowth, will undoubtedly make rather more nianuie ^''sn in any other way ; and it may 

 M expedien". mnny times to give poor lands M. This is especially true in the rccluniation of barrvn land* 



