STATE POMOLOGICAL SOCIETY. 139 



manures to all plants, or when a selection has been made, it was 

 not based upon a knowledge of their peculiar character and com- 

 position." Few are the soils anywhere found that have not these 

 alkaline earths in greater or less amount ; but since plants, trees 

 and grasses take up a large amount of the constituent elements of 

 their organization, the soil after a time becomes exhausted and 

 must be re-supplied by the processes of nature or the chemical 

 resources of man. In process of time nature will decompose or 

 disintegrate the rocks holding the alkaline earths, and carbonic 

 acid will combine with them and re-supply the salts. In this and 

 other ways, land left in fallow will recover from exhaustion. 



Years ago immense crops of wheat, corn and tobacco were 

 raised in fertile Virginia, but as it is estimated that at least 120 

 pounds of alkaline earths were carried away every year from each 

 acre of soil, it at last succumbed to tire exhaustion. Nature and 

 the farmer's knowledge being unequal to re-supply the lost material, 

 the result has been that millions of acres of these once productive 

 lauds in more Northern and Southern States, as well as in Vir- 

 ginia, have been thrown out to be reclaimed by nature in her slow 

 process of restoration in the decajnng foliage of the forests for 

 another century. Rotation of crops, land in fallow, and the indis- 

 criminate use of all kinds of manure to overcome the exhaustion 

 and increase the fertility of the soil, have been the means employed 

 from the earliest times ; but now we understand each day the laws 

 of nature better, and discover the secrets of her handmaid, organic 

 chemistry. Necessity caused men to apply remedies in sickness 

 indiscriminately and empirically, to-day the developing sciences, 

 chemistry and physiology teach us better ways to use the oppor- 

 tune time to administer and the individual specific to prescribe. 

 When we learn what constitutes good soil to produce standard 

 crops for each family of plants, we shall then look for causes in 

 the deviation from the standard, and cure them the same as an 

 educated physician successfully treats a sick man, because he 

 knows what constitutes a man in health. 



Much attention has been given of late to the condition of the 

 soil for grain growing purposes, and a brighter day is beginning 

 to dawn through increased intelligence. In the cultivation of 

 fruit trees, fruit growers have given more attention to the "kinds" 

 than to the soil ; yet the same laws of nature demand as much at- 

 tention and study for fruit culture as for cereals. * * 



In a treatise on the cultivation and management of fruit trees, 



