Proceedings of the Farmers' Club. 413 



I have never seen considered in all the discussions I have heard or 

 read on plowing, and yet it is a very important one. Soil is surface 

 and subsoil, and they are of very different characters. Mineralogi- 

 cally, they were probably at the first exactly similar, for we cannot 

 imagine any conditions which should make them otherwise. But, 

 during many ages the soil has been producing vegetation, whose roots 

 have been abstracting something from below, which has, in the shape 

 of leaves and wood, been gradually deposited on the surface, and 

 there decomposing has formed, or helped to form, a surface soil dis- 

 tinct altogether in its nature from that beneath it. Thus we have 

 to treat, not a homogeneous soil to a great depth, but one which com- 

 pletely changes its character a few inches, generally, beneath the 

 surface. What we call a virgin soil, is one where this distinction is 

 most marked, where the surface is highly charged with fertility which 

 has been abstracted during ages from the soil beneath. This surface 

 soil alone is able to bear crops. If we were to remove it and plow 

 and sow the bare subsoil we could not expect to reap crops. Then 

 while the virigin soil is fresh and fertile we do not think of touching 

 what lies beneath it, and if it is sufficiently deep to enable the 

 operations of the plow to be properly performed to make a 

 sufficiently deep seed-bed, the subsoil is left intact. But by and 

 by the surface is exhausted, and we hear . the poverty-stricken 

 farmer told that he has another farm underneath the old one if he 

 will only dig it up. Perhaps he has ; but I have not yet seen it. I 

 have often, on the other hand, seen the surface soil kept increasing 

 in riches of fertility by good management ; which has consisted in 

 merely preserving the in statu quo, which nature left when man took 

 possession, by returning to the soil something of what the soil has 

 been so bountifully yielding. If we were to denude the soil of the 

 arable surface, long years of work and much expenditure of manure 

 would be necessary to bring it into a state of cultivation. How, 

 then, can its condition be different while still covered with the ori- 

 ginal surface \ There are exceptions, as where in alluvial bottoms a 

 soil is very deep, but on ordinary lands the difference between the 

 surface and subsoils is so marked that it is impossible to consider 

 them equally fitted for the plow or to bear crops. If this is true, for 

 what purpose then should the farmer permit his plow to penetrate 

 beneath the surface soil into a foreign and uncongenial one ? 



