On the Application of Manures. 



235 



was first settled/' (says Dr. Dwight,) the same exuberant fer- 

 tility was attributed to it which has since characterized Ken- 

 tucky. From those regions the paradise has travelled to the 

 western parts of the State of New York, to New Connecticut, 

 to Upper Canada, to the countries on the Ohio, to the south- 

 western territory, and is now making its progress over the Mis- 

 sissippi, into the newly-purchased regions of Louisiana. In con- 

 sequence of the long accumulation of vegetable mould, regions, 

 even if naturally sterile, hold out at first the promise of an abun- 

 dant return to the cultivator." 



Now there is little reason to doubt, that the first Egyptian and 

 Phoenician settlers in Greece, or the first Greeks who peopled 

 the shores of Italy or of Spain, would find themselves placed un- 

 der circumstances as favourable to husbandry as the present emi- 

 grants in the far west. 



It would seem, indeed, that the extraordinary exuberance of 

 newly-peopled countries, wherever at least the subsoil and cli- 

 mate are such as in any degree to allow of the spontaneous 

 growth of timber, may have given countenance to those visions re- 

 specting the Golden Age in which the teeming imaginations of 

 the inhabitants of early Greece delighted to indulge, when 



Kap~oi' e(pepe i^eihopo^ apovpa 



AvTO^Larr], ttoWoi^ te kciI acpBoi'oy- 



But in the case of the colonist of antiquity, as in that of the 

 settler in the new world at the present day, a period at length 

 must arrive when the ground, exhausted by unintermitted tillage, 

 would cease to yield him a profitable return, in which case, so 

 long as abundance of good land remained unoccupied, the most 

 obvious course for him to pursue would be that of abandoning 

 his present possessions, and of advancing further into the vacant 

 territory until he lighted upon a tract better suited to his 

 purpose. 



This accordingly is the practice often adopted in the United 

 States, not only in the newly-settled countries of the west, but 

 even in the older Slates of Georgia and the Carolinas, where the 

 cultivation of cotton, however profitable it may be at first, speed- 

 ily exhausts the land, and reduces it to sterility; so that in pass- 

 ing through these districts we frequently see estates which had 

 once yielded an abundant return, since abandoned by their pos- 

 sessor, and becoming again a portion of the original wilderness. 



And disheartening as it may at first sight appear to him to 

 submit to the Sisyphean labour of bringing continually fresh land 

 under his dominion, and again to relinquish his conquests after 

 so short a period of occupation, the plan alluded to is the only 

 one which presents itself to the settler in a new country for re- 



