SUMMARY OF ALFALFA SOWING. 499 
usually needs no grinding to make it decompose in 
the soil. If it is broken into fragments as coarse 
as eggs it will in a year nearly disappear from sight. 
It could be loaded on cars with steam shovels for 
probably 25 cents per ton and sent out to farmers 
not within reach of the lime hills. Used liberally 
on the loams, clay and sandy soils of the surround- 
ing region, it would marvelously promote their abil- 
ity to grow legumes of all sorts, even to alfalfa. At 
Macon, Miss., E. V. Yates covered a plot of sandy 
well enriched soil an inch deep with this decomposed 
unpulverized limestone, and sowed it to alfalfa. The 
result was splendid, the alfalfa growing there taller, 
more thrifty and more healthy than in the limestone 
prairie soils near by. The sandy soil was almost 
perfectly drained, and that is the key to his suc- 
cess. I hope to live to see millions of tons of this 
so easily quarried limestone used on the lands of 
Alabama, Mississippi and Georgia. 
Alfalfa in the Delta of the Mississippi River.— 
For some years I co-operated with Bolton Smith in 
an endeavor to renew the life of a number of dead 
plantations in Louisiana. It was a vast tract of 
abandoned land, abandoned partly because of dis- 
couragement concerning the cotton boll weevil and 
largely because of soil difficulties. The land belonged 
to a syndicate of Scots. My part of the work was 
to study the soils and how to renew them. I learned 
that the land was a dense, very fine clay, deposited 
by overflows of the Mississippi River, with a good 
deal of lime, phosphorus and potash in it but very 
