608 Transactions of the American Institute. 



are doing what the Creator abstained from doing, they are mixing 

 the latent with the sui-tace elements and creating a valuable soil. 



This great enterprise of agricultural creation has just begun. Our 

 children will live to see the steam car and the steam marl-shovel 

 cooperating till all that tertiary plain shall bloom with the crimson 

 of flowers and fruit, and rustle with the music of ripened grain. 



Before closing this paper, will j^ou bear with me a few moments, 

 gentlemen, if we lift up our eyes from these details, and speak a few 

 words of wider import. Deep are the secrets of human history ; 

 deeper far the inscrutable mysteries of geological lore. Palmyra was 

 sunk in sand, Pompeii overwhelmed with ashes, the cities of the plain 

 were deluged with fire ; but in these cool, green banks of manure, 

 that reach from bay to bay across a commonwealth, are records of 

 a submergence far more ancient, involving not an island, nor a city, 

 but all the broad margin of a far stretching continent. "Why this 

 long plunge beneath the brine ? What life of plants, or beasts, or 

 fishes was thus quenched ? He knows who made the world. But 

 musing on these titanic hieroglyphs of the rock and of the mud, can 

 we not catch gleams of a celestial husbandry ; of a foresight that had 

 been vigilant for human weal ages before the fig-leaves lolled in the 

 perfumed air of the first garden. Long lapses there were of carboni- 

 ferous life, whose sole utility, so far as we know, was to garner up 

 heat and force in continental coarl vaults. Later epochs there were of 

 swarming sea life and mud life; waters lashed with armies of sharks, 

 vast banks of mussels, leagues and leagues of mud-worms and shell- 

 fish. Then all this existence, the active and the sluggish alike, was 

 entombed. Old nature, wiser and more cunning than- Egyptian 

 priests, sunk these mummied forms of her dead children beneath the 

 ocean beds, and piled banks of sand over them, but not that they 

 might remain ever more sequestered from human scrutiny, not to 

 sleep in an unending night. These marl-pits are our granaries. 

 Here are our treasure vaults. Hence may exhume, not trinkets, not 

 a shining nugget, not a glancing stone, but elements that shall pile 

 our corn-cribs, that may stall-feed our oxen, and deck our tables with 

 the wheaten loaves. 



These buried fertilizers are not confined to New Jersey. They are 

 found beneath the tide counties of Maryland, Virghiia and the Caro- 

 linas. In Charleston, the great beds of phosphate that more effectually 

 than any civil change may revolutionize the tillage of exhausted 

 plantations, are of like origin, and have a similar geological history. 



