AMERICAN INSTITUTE. 335 



A soil may be full of feldspar, (the original source of all potash) 

 and still need potash produced from higher organisms for the use 

 of the current crops. Farms in the immediate vicinity of the Do- 

 ver locality of chlor-apatite rock, (phosphate of lime) and with 

 soils fully charged with the debris of this rock, are still improved 

 by minute doses of calcined bones treated with sulphuric acid, 

 and for the same reasons that the soils of Westchester and Dutch- 

 ess counties, made of the debris of lime-stone, are improved by 

 new quantities of artificially prepared carbonate of lime. It is 

 true of every primary, and is traceable throughout nature. While 

 plants have been thus progressing by having their pabulum pro- 

 gressed, animals, at least those useful to man, and necessary to 

 remain in existence, have progressed, while those which Nature's 

 laws seem to have formed as mere machines for the progression of 

 primaries, by the mastication and digestion of the food, its assimi- 

 lation and their decay, have gradually become extinct. 



We find the tooth of the largest living shark but one inch high, 

 wiiile the sharks' teeth found in the green sand marls of New 

 Jersey are many times that size. The mastodon (whose bones are 

 found at Great Bone Lick in Kentuck}^, and in Liberia,) are many 

 times the size of the modern elephant. The skeletons found in 

 the hyena caves of England, are three times as large as those of 

 the hyena of the present day. Our largest saurians represent in 

 inches, what fossil geologists have found represented in feet. In- 

 deed, this is true of many extinct species of animals, which even 

 at this time, from their fossil remains are furnishing the phos- 

 phates and other primaries which w^ere received from the rock, 

 and progressed by them for the use of man. But it is far other- 

 wise with the useful animals. Look at the returns of the Smith- 

 field market of two hundred years ago, and the returns at the 

 present time, and we shall find that the modern ox slaughters one- 

 third heavier than his predecessors. Even the horses represented 

 in the Elgin marbles, although beautiful as works of art, will not 

 fill the eye of a horse-breeder of this day. They are inferior in 

 form and size. And this is true notonly of the inferior animals, 

 but also of man. 



At the Eglinton tournament which occurred a few years ago 

 in England, many of the young nobility appeared in the armor 



