PROCEEDINGS OF THE FARMERS' CLUB. S47 



and these can all be supplied ia tUo easiest possible manner through the 

 medium of irrigation. The fact is that even our richest virgin soil compos- 

 ing the western prairies cannot and does not remain long unimpaired, unless 

 those substances are replaced of which it has been deprived by continual 

 cropping. 



^i^The fact to be borne in mind by farmers is that turnips and wheat are far 

 from being natural productions, and as they are not, they impoverish the 

 unassisted soil far more rapidly than the wild plants of the field do; pota- 

 toes and turnips in their wild state are unfit for food, and two fruits cannot 

 be conceived more different in appearance, size and color, than the wild 

 choke pear and the superb Bartlett, or the common crab and the magnifi- 

 cent pippin. Nature can and docs feed them in their wild state, but if we 

 improve them assistance by artificial nourishment must not be denied them, 

 if it is they will degenerate, for nature cannot supply it in sufficient quan- 

 tity. The time has nearly arrived when land will be manured with saline 

 Bolutions, the ashes of burned rye, wheat, buckwheat, and barley straw^ 

 phosphoric acid prepared in factories, and all placed on the land through 

 the medium of liquids, assisting the crops with the same certainty that 

 quinine does the fever and ague. 



Two exhausting crops should on no account succeed one another on the 

 same land, because in structure they are alike and, consequently, take 

 fiimilar ingredients from the earth 



Leguminous, culmiferous and root crops do well to alternate with each 

 other, for the reason that their composition, structure, and excrementitioua 

 matters are different, and consequently cannot injure each other. If the 

 first is a hoed crop let the second be a grain crop; nature recommends this 

 course by alwa^'s alternating her forests; the oak succeeds pine, the beech 

 hemlock, and tiie cedar hickory. The strawberry vine flees from the excre- 

 ment cast off" from tlie parent stool and plants itself in new and uncontam- 

 inated grinuid, and the raspberry always changes its location through the 

 medium of its roots. Natural meadows change their grasses, change, 

 therefore, appears to be a law of nature and all man has to do is to study 

 and follow her. 



Gray in speaking of the agency of water, says, that it may be studied 

 under its solvent properties, chemical agency, mechanical agency, and as 

 affording food. It dissolves and holds in solution a great variety of sub- 

 stances, mineral, vegetable and animal, and is the great solvent in all 

 nature's operations; and when it passes through the earth dissolves its 

 soluble salts, such as lime, nitre, potash, salt, &c., and conveys them to 

 the roots of plants; it takes up the soluble parts of vegetable mould as 

 fast as the chemical changes in the soil renders them soluble and suited to 

 the nourishment of plants. It also absorbs gaseous compounds, such as 

 carbonic acid, ammonia and air. When soils are left to rest for a short 

 period their renewed fertility is mainly due to water which causes the 

 vegetable matter in the soil to decay chemically. The mechanical effect of 

 water is to enter the outer husk of the seed, and divide the soil so that the 

 roots may extend themselves; in passing over rocks it wears off the pro- 

 jecting particles which remain on it mechanically suspended. As nourish- 

 ment it constitutes a large portion of the juices of plants; the woody fibre 



