COFFEE CULTIVATION AND MANURING. 121 
are both the result of wrong doing—outraging the 
decrees of an all wise Creator. Weeds have been held 
in great detestation by all true cultivators from the 
days of Job, the patient, upright farmer of Uz, who, 
on his farm, employed no fewer than 500 yoke of 
oxen. In his solemn protestation of the integrity with 
which he had fulfilled the several duties of life, and 
making the proper cultivation of his land the culmin- 
ating point in his declaration, he says :—‘‘lf my 
land cry out against me, or the several furrows thereof 
likewise complain, let thistles grow instead of wheat, 
and noisome weeds instead of barley.” 
. Having thus shown that a mere list of the names 
of so-called weeds would not help us to a solution of 
our question—that weeds are a consequence of the 
transgression on the part of man of Nature’s laws, 
and that conscientious and careful cultivators from the 
days of Job down to those of W. F., have always 
held them in the utmost abhorrence, we now come to 
the question itself, ‘‘ What is a weed?” When this 
question was put to an old farmer who was denounc- 
ing weeds in general, he indignantly replied, ‘‘ A weed 
is a useless plant that robs the soil.” But when 1 
was pointed out to him that even the meanest plant 
that grows was not created in vain, he attempted to 
mend this definition, and doggedly asserted that a 
‘‘weed is a weed, and everyone knows what that is.” 
It would appear, however, that W. F. and one or 
two more from whom we have received communica- 
tions on the same subject, do not know. We may 
therefore state, for their information, that the true 
definition of a weed is ‘‘a plant out of place.” This 
only is a weed. There are no weeds in Nature’s uni- 
versal farm. The crop of this year may become the 
weed of next. Anyone who had grown a crop of po- 
tatoes and sown the ground with wheat will have had 
an ocular proof of this statement. When a man is 
hoeing mangels, everything that is not mangel is treat- 
ed as a weed, and yet the hoer may be chopping down 
plants that constitute the crop in the next paddock 
or on some other portion of the farm. Weeds, then, — 
bear no distinctive character as such, and plants only 
become weeds by the mere accident of position. The 
weed is treated as an enemy to the crop, but it is 
by no means such as regards the soil. Weeds, as we 
have before stated,—and it is to this that ‘“‘W. F.” 
takes exception—do not impoverish the soil. Any 
plant, as we have shown, may become a weed, but 
no plant can impoverish the soil except by the aid of 
man, Carry off the land on which it has grown any 
crop produced, whether it be for the use of man or 
only a ‘*noxious weed,” and the land becomes im- 
