750 [Assembly 



Dr. Underbill. Put manure ten inches or a foot deep, and not five 

 inches as is usual. Gurney's plan of covering soil with matting or 

 a thick coat of hay or straw, is found to enrich the soil under it 

 rapidly. These coats prevent the escape of the ascending elements 

 of manure. In Madeira, for their grape vines, they dig trenches 

 sometimes five to ten feet deep, put in manure, fill up and plant vines 

 on it. 



Mr. Hall. These are practiced on side hills, so that the vines are 

 planted in steps or terraces, that occasionally makes the depth ad- 

 verted to by Dr. Underhill. Little manure is generally used on vines 

 in wine districts, and that commonly on the surface of the ground, 

 and this is the custom on some of the most choice vineyards in 

 Europe. 



Dr. Unrlerhill. In some parts of Madeira, where the vines are not 

 so good by a third, they put on manure, not deep. But where manure 

 is put dow^n deep, it supplies the vine for a century. 



Mr. Meigs. Columella, about eighteen hundred years ago, recom- 

 mended for grape vines a trench not less than three feet deep, with 

 some stones and bones at the bottom, then good soil over them. He 

 astonished the Roman world with his grapes, as well as many other 

 vegetable productions. 



Judge Van Wyck. It is said that the leaves of the grape vine are 



the best manure for it. How does Dr. Underhill account for the 



total disappearance of the muck which he put under some of his 

 vines? 



Dr. Underhill. By capillary attraction, which causes water to rise 

 three or four feet in soils, at least, by solar heat. In that experi- 

 ment the sandy soils became in four or five years as dark colored as 

 the alluvial muck below, and the sand in which I had put the muck 

 was as clear as it could be, having not the slightest sign of the 

 muck which I had put in. This is a fact which I am compelled to 

 believe if the opinions of an hundred million of men were opposed 

 to it. I base all. my agriculture on these facts, and I believe that in 

 our State and in Jersey only, hundreds of thousands of dollars are 

 annually thrown away, by putting the manures too near the surface 

 of the soil. Opinion is nothing when compared with truth, which 

 is eternal. 



