218 Transactions of tee A^ierican Institute. 



brought in shjps from the islands of the South Pacific; the science 

 of chemistry is producing fertilizing compounds more or less useful, 

 and all these are found to pay, but they are all expensive and most 

 of them only transient in their effects. Here is a fertilizer almost 

 without cost, utterly inexhaustible, both quick and permanent in 

 its effects, underlying a large portion of seven of the twenty-one 

 counties of the State. 



Here is a machine worked by a sixteen-horse steam engine, occu- 

 pying little more space than the stable of one horse. It is a dredge, 

 such as is used for digging out the harbors about New York. It floats 

 in a canal of its own digging, and is now talking out a stratum of 

 marl twenty-five feet deep. Look at it. There goes the mighty arm, 

 lifting a shovelful into the cars — a ton at a time! And this can go 

 on just so — a ton a minute for every hour of the twenty-four, every 

 day of all the year, until not only all the farms of New Jersey, 

 but the farms of outside barbarians also, can be supplied, and per- 

 haps doubled in value. 



A few moments ago I heard the chairman of our committee 

 remark to our visitors that, " although this is Jersey, she is now in 

 the Union." New Jersey in the Union, forsooth! Was she ever 

 out of it ? Who ever said so in the Revolution ? Who dared say 

 so during the late war ? Out of the Union, indeed ! In agricul- 

 ture, New Jersey is the foremost of all the States by more than 

 twenty dollars an acre, as shown by the census report of the value 

 of farms. This disproportion is partly owing to our proximity to 

 the great markets, but in a great measure to this gi'een sand marl. 



Those who were familiar with the desolate appearance of the 

 worn-out farms of South Jersey, thirty or forty years ago, and 

 especially in the county of Monmouth, would be amazed at their 

 present appearance. Farms not worth the tillage then, teeming 

 with abundance now — the then and noio as unlike as were the fat 

 and lean kine in the dream of Pharoah, and marl has been the 

 chief agent in bringing about this wonderful change. 



A farmer whose land will produce fair crops of clover, can grow 

 fair crops of almost anything else, and is comparatively inde- 

 pendent. Such a farmer may, by judicious management, double 

 the value of his laud during his lifetime, without the aid of other 

 fertilizers than those of his own farm. But let him begin early in 

 life to use either marl, lime, muck, or all combined, and also stimu- 

 late his crop by chemical preparations, as he finds them to suit, 

 both he and his lands will rapidly grow rich together. But the 



