454 TrANSACTIOXS of the AmEEICAN lySTITUTE. 



tlirongh alluvial deposit despite shallow plowing, the yield is good. 

 But if the teachings of Mr. Pettit and others are to be taken as true 

 doctrine, it will damage our farmers millions of dollars yearly. I 

 fancy that the mischief already done is the value of many million 

 bushels. In a dry time, and August is generally a rainless month all 

 over this continent, corn on three-inch plowing fails at once ; three 

 or four days will destroy as many million barrels. If those Virginia 

 fields had been stirred eight or ten inches deep, they would have 

 made a good crop of corn. 



Mr. Wm. Lawton. — I am rejoiced to listen to these remarks. "We 

 have done wrong, very wrong, to let any word go out from us that 

 would encourage the practice which the gentleman who has just spo- 

 ken so justly condemns. 



Mr. A. S. Fuller. — I said last spring that David Pettit's letter, if 

 it iniluericed as widely as it was read, would do more mischief than 

 all the good this Club ever accomplished. Farmers are lazy enough 

 anyhow ; and he says three inches is deep enough. I think eighteen 

 inches is shallow. I have flowers on a bed spaded eighteen inches, 

 and others on a bed two and a half feet, and those on the deep bed 

 show none of the effects of the drouth. I hope Mr. Greeley will con- 

 tinue to fight the shallow, mischievous doctrine that originates in a 

 corner of the State of New Jersey, and tends to the ruin of our agri- 

 culture. 



Dr. Isaac P. Trimble. — The idea of charging the failure of the corn 

 crop solely to shallow ploughing, is entirely unfair. Much conse- 

 quence as we may be disposed to attach to the influence of our pro- 

 ceedings, we certainly cannot be quite so viiin as to believe that any 

 recommendation of ours would have such immediate and extended 

 effect as has been intimated. The entire agricultural world does not, 

 I fear, read the reports, and we must not set too high a valuation upon 

 our power." Mr. Greeley is under a great misapprehension as regards 

 the quality of Salem county soil, and the flict remains that some 

 fields there M'hich were plowed six inches yielded a poorer crop than 

 others plowed half that depth. I repeat, and I solicit proof to the 

 contrary, that the Salem county cultivators grow, year after year, the 

 best corn crops in this country. Mr, Greeley should see their great 

 reaches of land devoted to this cereal. They get from sixty to eighty 

 l)ushels to the acre, and they plow three inches deep. These are facts 

 which cannot be gainsayed, and which cannot be got over or swept 

 aside with a flourish. 



