CARBONATE OF LIME. 125 
acids. Rains fall, they leach out lime, plants decay, 
turn sour, the acid attacks lime, thus year by year 
th top soil loses more and more its lime and tends 
to sourness. Once in Lincolnshire I walked down 
into a chalk pit where a laborer was loading a cart, 
on the farm of Henry Dudding, of Lincoln sheep and 
Short-horn cattle fame, and asked the laborer why 
he dug the chalk. ‘‘It be for the dung, sir,’’ was the 
response. 
‘‘And do you put it on the land?’’ 
‘‘Ay, and it do make the clovers and the grass 
grow better, sir,’’? was the response. This on a farm 
already buried in rich grass, already having enough 
lime in its soils so that sheep pasturing on them had 
bones like calves and cattle stood on legs like straight 
columns of a temple. 
Rider Haggard in his interesting book, ‘‘Rural 
England,’’ makes frequent reference to lucerne, 
stating usually that it is grown where the land was 
chalky and drouthy. On one farm he found them 
applying a sort of mar] that they dug from the sub- 
soil, this on the farm of Robert Stephenson of Bur- 
well, Cambridge. I quote: 
He described to me a process which I was not fortunate 
enough to witness, as in these days of depression it is, I under- 
stand, but seldom practiced on account of the initial expense, al- 
though it used to be common enough—that of treating fen lands 
with gault. This gault, a mixture of clay and marl, is dug from 
the subsoil out of trenches cut ten yards apart, and spread on 
the surrounding surface to the quantity of about 200 tons to the 
acre. The land thus treated is said to double its value. The cost 
of the operation may be put at from $15 to $25 per acre. One 
application will last from 10 to 12 years, the full benefits being 
experienced in the second year after treatment. 
