78 



Campbell's 1902 Soil Culture Manual. 



smother and parch out vegetation in this section of the country, those 

 pines showed no indication of distress. Going in among them and stoop- 

 ing down, and looking under their lower limbs, one could see not a single 

 particle of vegetable growth aside from the trees. The ground was thor- 

 oughly mulched with the needles which had fallen from them, and blan- 

 keted the earth, so to speak, with the mold which they had created. Re- 

 moving this carpet of needles one could find moist, cool soil at all times. 

 The conditions about the roots of these trees were such as their ancestors 

 found in the great pineries of Wisconsin, Minnesota and Michigan. Many 

 varieties of trees have been condemned as unfit for cultivation in Ne- 

 braska, after trying them in isolated positions, exposed to the hot sun and 

 drying winds from the southwest. Trees are almost as gregarious as hu- 

 man beings. No man or woman could have been perfectly developed, 

 physically and intellectually, in absolute solitude and without communica- 

 tion or intercourse with other human beings. And just so, no single tree 

 planted out on the hot jjrairie, exposed to the burning sun all day long, can 

 make as perfect a specimen of its kind as can be grown where trees are 

 clustered together. 



Arboriculture is absolutely indispensable to the conservation of other 

 plant life, and even to the existence of animal life on these plains. The 

 interdependence of the lives of trees and the lives of human beings is con- 

 stant. If a single summer should be passed without foliage, flower or 

 fruit on the globe, all animal existence would cease. 



Your great work in soil culiure is thoroughly appreciated by every 

 thinking citizen of Nebraska. Your intelligent efforts to benefit the agri- 

 culture and horticulture of this state are of greater value to your race and 

 to those who come after you than all the efforts of all the members of con- 

 gress who have ever represented this commonwealth at Washington. It is 

 a gratification to realize that soil culture and arboriculture are destined, 

 without asking an appropriation from the general government, to revolu- 

 tionize the climatic and productive conditions of the state of Nebraska. 

 Just as plants need light and as potato sprouts in dark cellars seek the 

 windows and doors where the sun's rays occasionally stream in, so all the 

 people of the prairie states need the illuminating practicalities of your re- 

 searches and experiments in soil culture, which illustrate the method of 

 insuring crops by intelligent tillage against destruction by droughts. 

 Arbor Lodge, Jan. 18th, 1902. J. Sterling Morton. 



