56 Journal of the Mitchell Society. [ June 
Similarly it was found out that certain incoherent white 
quartz sand in Florida was valuable pine-apple soil, notwith- 
standing it was over 99.5 pure quartz, because it possessed 
certain properties that the bacteriologist discovered. 
Investigation showed that the soil of the Connecticut. 
Valley, which produced only low grade tobaccos, sneered at 
as Connecticut cabbage leaf, was essentially the same as that 
which produced the Sumatra tobacco. But it was necessary 
to change the climatic conditions, and this was done by the 
use of cheese-cloth, increasing the humidity and raising the 
mean temperature ten degrees Fahr. Somewhat similar 
experiments have been tried in Darlington District, South 
Carolina, the result, so far as the production of Sumatra 
wrappers was concerned, being entirely satisfactory. And 
such investigations and experiments have been carried on all 
the way from Connecticut to Alabama and Texas with the 
result of greatly improving the product and greatly increas- 
ing the output, producing in the Southern States the cigar 
tobaccos of all lands. 
This matter of the investigation of soils is by no means 
new, though its methods and their application to agriculture 
are matters of little more than a decade. Such investigations 
were begun by Liebig at Giessen more than half a century 
ago. He and his assistants made countless analyses of the 
ashes of plants. These showed the presence of different 
minerals in every species, that each species requires from the 
ground the same class of salts, and hence that it must sooner 
or later exhaust the supply of these salts in a given plot, and 
render it unfit for the growth of the species in question 
unless fresh supplies are provided. 
“Liebig attempted to give the necessary supplies in the 
form of ‘Mineral Manure’, and soon set to work to study prac- 
tically the effect of mineral manures on a large scale. In 
the } 7 ear 1845, previous experiments in a garden having 
proved unsatisfactory, he purchased from the town of Giessen 
about ten acres of barren land — a sand pit, as he says, which 
