Proceedings of the Farmer^ Club. 607 



bushels of shelled corn per acre, its effects are marvelous. Before 

 it began to be used all tliat part of Jersey was a forlorn and hopeless 

 region. Ten acres. of it would give a little rail pen half full of nub- 

 bins. Now there is many a farmer who thinks the season or the tillage 

 has been bad if he does not pick 150 bushels of ears from each acre 

 of his Held. Land that then was worth fifteen dollars, twenty-five 

 dollars, and, at the highest, thirty dollars, cannot now be had at $150 

 per acre. Marl has wrought the change. Farms that hardly carried 

 ten hogs and six bullocks, now turn off forty fat hogs and fifty 

 beeves. 



A CoNJECTtJEE. 



What is marl? Chemistiw can tell us what are its constituents. 

 The farmer tells us what it does to his crops. The geologist tells us 

 sometliing of its tilluric history. But is it of animal or vegetable 

 origin ? Is it the detritus of rocks, and if so wliat rocks and how 

 were tliey thus strangely worn ? As a general rule the aptest food 

 of plants is the refuse of the food of animals or the decay of the 

 bodies of animals. Nature moves in a great and most admirable cycle. 

 Substances vile and refused of man, the offscouring and the excreta 

 are taken up by vegetable life, and, by the kindly and subtle alchemy 

 of life forces in the earth, wronght over into blade and flower and ear. 



I do not believe New Jersey green sand is an exception to this law 

 of nature. These little globules are, in my opinion, the excrements 

 of sea worms. The waters in which they lived and worked were 

 warm and still. They were a low order of animals, as dull, perhaps, 

 as earth-Y/orms, and probably as blindly industrious. They worked 

 like the coral insect. They have perished long ago, like the birds 

 that made the guano beds ; but here are their remains, a perpetual 

 treasure of fertility for higher races. 



The relation of these beds to the region in which they are located 

 is worth our consideration. All the region on the southward to the 

 sea coast and Delaware bay is defective in those elements which the 

 marl can supply. By reason of its natural sandiness and the fires 

 which for generations have swept through its pine forests, the earth 

 has been robbed of potash and phosphate, and the whole lace of the 

 country, though almost within sound of the fire bells of two great 

 cities, has been, till within half a score of years, a forest primeval. 

 Now, railroads are piercing the pine and oak thickets in every direc- 

 tion, and long trains of cars, loaded by steam and drawn by steam, 



