284 
SOUTHERN CULTIVATOR 
after phosphate of lime and magnesia, and after potash, 
soda, chlorine and sulphuric acid, have been removed in 
crops, or \vhere they were primarily lacking in the soil. 
A good planter will not only concede this fact theoreti- 
cally, but make it the basis of his system of rural econ- 
omy. In his last and best work on “The Relations of 
Chemistry to Agriculture,” Liebig has thus happily ex- 
pressed the views which the writer has long inculcated 
on this subject : 
“When it is considered that the sugar works in Wag- 
haiisel alone, send annually 600,000 lbs. of potash salts 
into commerce, which come from the fields of the best 
cultivators of Baden, without being replaced ; when it is 
borne in mind that in North Germany every year an 
enormous quantity of potatoes are grown with help of 
guano, exclusively for the manufacture of spirits, and 
that besides the ingredients of the guano, none of the 
materials removed from these fields are restored to them, 
one cannot be in doubt as to the ultimate condition of 
such fields. The store of these other soil ingredients may 
be ever so large ; it is exhaustible. 
“ I feel that to know is not to be able, and that to the 
actual establishment of a new science, only a new gene- 
ration is adapted.” 
Baron Liebig knows that vast quantities of potash are 
annually consumed in growing sugar beets in Baden, 
and potatoes in North Germany, ; for his keen, chemical 
and physiological eye sees, that not an atom of sugar in 
the beet, nor one of starch in the potato, can be formed 
without the aid of a present alkali in the tissues of the 
plant. But to know these pregnant facts, is “ not to be 
able” to secure the restitution to the soil of this precious 
alkali, for the annual production of sugar and starch, in 
all coming time. Cell-labor, by which cotton seed and 
lint, wheat and corn, potatoes and beets are elaborated, 
is a department of agricultural physiology very little cul- 
tivated in any country. The agricultural philosopher 
indulges in the following suggestions : “ The human 
being demeans himself in relation to mental food like a 
plant. As this must receive its food from nature not 
concentrated, but infinitely diluted with water, so is it 
with the human mind ; an abstract truth acts only on the 
sense and feelings when it is presented to them sufficiently 
diluted, shown up in all its aspects, and covered with 
dress and finery.” 
In one form or another, “dress and finery” will, doubt- 
less, always be more popular than dry, hard, abstract 
truths. These, however, gradually lose much of their 
uninviting sternness, as the popular mind becomes familiar 
with the prominent features and usefulness in the every- 
day duties of life. Farmers are not so unwilling to learn 
how plants gain in weight when growing, as some assert. 
The consumers of their great staples are more to blame 
for wasting the elements of crops in cities and villages, 
than the cultivators are for not finding out ways and 
means to supply the loss of potash, ammonia and bones 
taken out of their cultivated fields. All that eat bread and 
wear clothing have an equal interest in the agricultural 
resources of the community or nation to which they be- 
long. The evil is not partial in its extent, but universal; 
and no speciality can meet all the requirements of the 
case. Greater mechanical skill in tillage may give tem- 
porarily larger crops, and pass among superficial observers 
for substantial progress and improvement. Such changes, 
however, have no natural or scientific basis ; they only 
take a little more potash, bone dust and ammonia out of 
the surface of the ground in a given time — nothing more. 
The principles of universal husbandry reach to all con- 
sumers, and demand of them restitution. Once admit the 
doctrine that no one is under any moral obligation to feed 
the land that feeds him, and general desolation becomes 
the law of society. No cultivator can create an atom of 
the raw material needed to form any crop whatever ; and 
as crops cannot possibly grow without the precise things 
required by nature to build every part of the living struc- 
ture, common sense fully sustains the teaching of science 
in reference to the wisdom and duty of husbanding the 
essential elements of human food and raiment. Instead 
of making great cities like London, Paris and New York, 
the recipient of the strength and the treasure of all fertile 
lands, and thereby blighting the earth with the curse of 
sterility, the owners of cultivated lands should compel the 
denizens of cities to pay tribute to their Mother Earth, 
and thus accumulate the wealth of society, not in over- 
grown towns, to corrupt the few and pauperize the many, 
but in millions of acres of a truly bountiful soil for the 
enduring benefit of all mankind. The surplus earnings of 
human industry, the wealth of the world, is no where so 
safe nor so useful as in improved lands, spread out over 
broad fields, like the blest rain and sunshine of Heaven. 
At present, commerce is only the half of an idea; and 
that idea is mercenary, not a philanthropic, or a scienti- 
fic thought. Let genuine philanthropy or science direct 
commercial movements, and the soil, instead of losing so 
much and receiving little in return, will be made what 
Nature intended it should be, the ground store-house of 
boundless riches. This moral and economical view of 
agriculture, cuts off the possibility of a monopoly of 
wealth; it distributes capital over continents and islands 
co-extensively with the human family, and saves cities 
from becoming such pestilential sinks of pollution. And 
why should not the farm and the garden, the orchard and 
the forest, be, in truth, as well as in theory, the favored ob- 
jects of human ambition, rather than brick and mortar,, 
wood and stone heaped up in cities, which a spark of fire 
may destroy, and leave nothing but dust and rubbish to 
the owner. It is»the glory of agricultural science to teach 
man both how to diffuse wealth, and how to increase its 
productiveness, for the equal benefit of all. L. 
[From the. Transactions of the Agricultu ral Association of 
the Slaveholding States] 
THE CLOVERS AHD GRASSES OF THE SOUTH. 
ADDRESS OP COL. ISAAC CROOM, OP ALABAMA. 
The Chronicles of the first half of the 19th century will 
present no great department of human industry, subject to- 
greater reproach than that of Southern Agriculture. The 
vicious system has grown out of a seemingly unlimited 
extent of virgin soils, which nevertheless have been rapid- 
ly subdued and exhausted. Such a temptation may fur- 
nish some apology, but little justification, to the intelligent 
agriculturist, accessible as he is, to the precepts and ex- 
amples of better systems of husbandry, and urged, as he- 
is, both by interest and duty, to adopt them. 
The purpose of our Association, laudable in the highest 
degree, is to arrest this downward course, to liberate our 
rural economy, if economy it may be called, from the re- 
proachful imputations of the past, to awaken it to a new 
life and to provide that in future it shall, stimulated by 
the successful examples of others, move forward in the 
path which has been irradiated by science, and which 
leads to the good of private and public prosperity. 
To accomplish this very important result, worthy of 
the highest efforts of us all, it becomes necessary to scruti- 
nise the errors, thedefects and the vices of existing modes, 
and to suggest and to commend to public favor the reme- 
dies, the improvements and the benefits of the new ones. 
With this view, the responsible duty has devolved upon 
us of showing, so far as our humble ability will allow, how 
far it is practicable to remove what has been to the pre- 
sent time, a sore reproach to Southern Agriculture, by ad- 
dressing the Association on Clovers and the Grasses 
adapted to the Southern or Planting States. 
