Proceedings of the Farmers' Club. 287 



come, and thus to vindicate the lines along which a true progress 

 must move toward the farming that is to be. 



First. We need a better way of talking about soils. A farmer 

 reports such and such treatment on a sandy loam or on a clay loam. 

 There are twenty sorts of clay loam, and as many kinds or specimens 

 of sandy loams. Some years ago it was believed that analyses of 

 soils would give positive figures by which farmers could always know 

 what they are handling. It is considered, in a rude way, that all 

 soils are grades of clay or of sand. This is a mistake. The earth 

 produced by the breaking up of mica slate and hornblende slate 

 is not a clay ; yet it is in no sense a sand. What should it be called ? 

 On the Pacific slope they have a very stiff, strong clay, produced by 

 the wearing down of the bastard granite of the sierras and their spurs. 

 This soil is unlike any soil in the east ; yet it has no name. So also 

 of the dark, fine mould of the prairie. We have no suitable term 

 for it. 



Second. We need to know more of the adaptation of varieties to 

 soils. In the small fruits, we find that some berries are failures on 

 the soil produced by the crushing of the granite rocks. On the red 

 shale of New Jersey they prosper. The Triomphe on sandy land 

 fails. The Eomeyn, a berry so similar to the Triomphe that many 

 say it is the same, prospers on sandy loams. The Bartlett pear, of 

 Boston, is unsurpassed. In this latitude it has many rivals, both in 

 productiveness and flavor. A Roxbury russet, grown at Koxbury, 

 is a noble apple. In western New York it is unequal to the Spitzen- 

 berg or the Rhode Island Greening. This is especially true of the 

 grape. The vine has its favorite climates and its peculiarly adapted 

 soils. The lake climate for grapes is a remarkable peculiarity, and 

 we do not know enough of its extent or of the sorts of grapes that 

 will fully ripen in those favored spots. The knowledge we have on 

 these subjects needs to be first enlarged, then systematized and 

 mapped clown ; then it should be made popular and scattered broad- 

 cast. Millions of dollars are wasted annually in attempts to grow 

 a variety of wheat, a kind of potato, a sort of berry, in a soil ill 

 adapted to it, but kindly toward another variety of the same plant. 



Third. We spread our manures and our seed over too much sur- 

 face. We get ten bushels of rye from two acres, when we might take 

 it from one. We run over fifty acres for fifty tons of hay, when it 

 could be cut with less labor and of better quality from twenty-five 

 acres. None of our acres but will bring, some income, without culti- 

 vation, by a growth of wood. East of the mountains, it would be 



