274 
AMERICAN AGRICULTURIST. 
or leaves, absorb ammonia or nitrogen from 
the air, but we believe that ammonia is 
largely attracted from it by every carbon¬ 
aceous or fertile soil; and in this way the 
crop is greatly augmented, and far beyond the 
contribution or aid it derives from the origi¬ 
nal materials of the soil. 
DOES GUANO EXHAUST LAND 1 
This is a question frequently asked us of 
late. The following extraet of a letter on 
guano, written by .T. M. Dantzler, St. Mat¬ 
thews, S. C., in the December number of the 
American Cotton Planter, is just to the 
point, and expresses very nearly our own 
words in a private letter to an inquirer on 
this subject. The remarks refer to cotton, 
but are equally applicable to other crops. 
My idea in regard to the manner in which 
the cotton is benefitted by guano on the kind 
of lands 1 plant, is in affording the plant sus¬ 
tenance at once, thereby giving it sufficient 
health and constitution to enable it to manu¬ 
facture or grow cotton out of the coarse 
and somewhat indigestible food found in the 
soil, which it could not do unaided by guano, 
or some other concentrated fertilizer. If it 
has to subsist, without any assistance, in this 
poor and worn soil, as a natural consequence 
it will be delicate and sickly—possessing 
small short roots, and its digestive organs 
will remain during its entire growth too 
feeble to consume this coarse food found in 
the soil. If you enable the plant to take up 
this food, a very important object is accom¬ 
plished. 
As to the general impression that guano is 
exhausting to the land, and will ultimately 
injure it, I can not speak from experience, 
but my opinion is that if it is injurious to 
land, it is in the manner just mentioned ; in 
imparting additional health and vigor to the 
cotton plant, or to whatever else it is applied, 
and thereby enabling it to take up more 
nourishment than it otherwise would. I do 
not believe, if it is properly applied, that it 
possesses in itself any property injurious to 
the land, but its effect is indirect, instead of 
direct. I have all of the land on which I 
used it last year guanoed this year, and I 
discover no difference between it and the 
rest of the field, which was guanoed for the 
the first time this year. 
Translated from the French, for the Am. Agriculturist. 
DEGENERACY OF THE POTATO. 
With respect to the potato, nature seems 
clearly to have made provision for the per¬ 
manent health as well as for the productive¬ 
ness of her own offspring, in the seed con¬ 
tained in the berry which the plant produces 
from its stalk ; and, consequently, by our 
endeavoring to perpetuate any particular sort 
of potato, by continually cutting and plant¬ 
ing its tubers, it is reasonably to be expected 
that we shall injure its general properties 
and powers, and thus gradually render it 
less fit for food, and more liable to disease. 
It will follow that, in order to be as certain 
of obtaining as good a crop of potatoes as it 
is possible to be, the ground, before being 
planted, should be thoroughly pulverized; 
the manure should be well fermented; the 
sets should be whole potatoes and never de¬ 
prived of their first shoots, nor allowed to 
ferment; and lastly, that a constant succes¬ 
sion of new sorts should be raised from the 
berries of the old ones. The newly raised 
sorts will doubtless admit of being cut with 
safety for several years, and would be but 
little affected by other external injuries, un¬ 
less peculiarly delicate, as they would pos¬ 
sess all the health and vigor of a plant prop¬ 
agated according to nature’s laws. By at¬ 
tending to these few suggestions, which ex¬ 
perience warrants, a full crop of potatoes 
may, under all ordinary circumstances of the 
weather, at all times be secured. 
For the American Agriculturist 
SUNDRY MATTERS. 
This has been so far an unusually cold 
December, with snow in profusion ; yet the 
temperature has not, in one instance, fallen 
below zero ; while at Albany the mercury 
has stood 10 below 0, it was here, at the 
same hour, four above ; prima facie that our 
alluvial formations have a temperature 
above them to aid also in creaturely com¬ 
forts. 
This is the last day for paying our county 
tax, with the minimum commission to the 
collector of one per cent ; after this day he 
is entitled to five per cent. Almost every 
farmer in jdown saves four per cent by his 
punctuality ; how many more hundreds of 
them might save by doing all their work 
thus well and in season. If there is any 
other trade or calling that suffers more by 
neglect and bad management than farming, 
methinks it has not yet come to light. Yet, 
there are many who have in part overcome 
the drouth of the past season by good far¬ 
ming ; here is a farmer who got 750 bushels 
of shelled corn from fifteen acres, while his 
neighbor, on a soil like it in all its original 
constituents, gets less than 200 bushels 
from the same number of acres. The for¬ 
mer grows his own clover-seed and sows it 
without any stint; his corn was planted on a 
stiff clover sod, partially manured with stable 
dung and plowed deeply in the fall; the 
other grew no clover ^seed, and he said it 
“ cost too much to buy, it was full of foul 
seed, &c.” He plowed in a very thin sod in 
the spring, with little manure, and planted 
about a [fortnight later than his neighbor, 
28th May. Now I am prepared to hear 
some of my fellow farmer readers say that 
the 200 bushel farmer was the laziest of the 
two, when the reverse was actually the case, 
as no lazy man could thus patiently labor to 
so little profit. However, the superior men¬ 
tal activity of the successful man is beyond 
disputation. 
Manuring with the clover plant ( Trifolium 
pratense) and tile draining are the basis 
of all good farming on our heavy, calcareous 
loams, where stock is not kept in sufficient 
force to sustain the fertility of the soil with 
animal manures alone. I wish some of your 
Eastern correspondents would explain why 
New-England is so far behind old England 
in keeping up the fertility of her best arable 
soils ; why it is that so much more white 
daisy is grown there than red clover. It was 
a sad sight last summer to see those once 
really beautiful islands, Conanicut and Rhode 
Island, covered with hoary white, as if 
marked for the grave of the great vegetable 
kingdom. It was not always so, for I have 
heard my old uncle say that, the year that 
“ pleasant'place of all festivity,” the Mal- 
bone house was burned, his father, on Co¬ 
nanicut, grew forty bushels of winter wheat 
to the acre. The exhaustion of potash in 
the soil is, doubtless, the main cause of ster¬ 
ility, as the great sea itself supplies that 
region with the other phosphates, and abund¬ 
ant nitrogen in the bones and bodies of Mem- 
haden and other animal, vegetable, and cal¬ 
careous matter, thrown ashore there in great 
profusion. 
I well remember when barley was a larger 
crop on those islands than it is here, now, 
in Seneca County; but when the white 
daisy came with its death-wand to appropri¬ 
ate the fag end that was left of vegetable 
nutrition, the epicurean barley plant “ sunk 
and made no sign.” N’Importe. 
Waterloo, Dec., 25th 1854. 
SMITHFIELD CLUB CATTLE SHOW. 
The Bazaar was opened on the evening of 
Monday for the private view, an opportunity 
which was made use of by remarkably few 
visitors; and the number on the succeeding 
days has not equaled that of last year’s 
meeting. The exhibition is, however, equal¬ 
ly attractive; to the mere amateur more so 
than ever, and to the professional man as 
well. For the former, the elegant forms of 
the Devon and the Down, the most beautiful 
of breeds in cattle and sheep respectively, 
never appeared either in equal perfection or 
in such numbers. For the latter there are 
matters just as usefully demanding his atten¬ 
tion, whether in satisfaction or regret. He 
finds as much to attract his notice among 
the implements upstairs; and among the 
cattle, sheep, and pigs, he has pressed upon 
him such matters as the relative merits of 
breeds (for notwithstanding that Devons, 
Herefords, and Short Horns are separated 
now, yet there are the medals for the best 
cow and ox respectively in the yard, for 
which they still come into mutual competi¬ 
tion ; and the Short Horns have now for 
three years in succession carried off the 
palm). There is also the progress oj individul 
breeders, and the decadence of others. 
We can observe the entrance of new 
names, and the gradual progress of well- 
known ones—how Lord W'alsingham’s 
sheep are obviously year by year gaining in 
quality and weight, and his Grace the Duke 
of Richmond’s too, whose young Down 
sheep are astonishing ; and there are mat¬ 
ters connected with breeding generally as, 
for instance, in the cross-bred classes, where 
there is a singular illustration of the relative 
influence of the male and female parent on the 
character of the offspring—the bull in every 
instance impressing his character on the cross 
to the almost entire absorption of the influ¬ 
ence of the dam, Lord Radnor’s cross-bred 
Hereford and Short Horns being to all appear¬ 
ance pure bred Herefords, while Mr. Hewer’s 
Short Horn and Hereford—which, however, 
is not a half-and-half cross—being apparent¬ 
ly a Short Horn. 
The cross-bred sheep, too, were well de¬ 
serving notice, and Mr. Druce, of Oxfordshire, 
who deserves great credit for his energy and 
success in enforcing the proficableness of 
the cross-bred Down and long-wooled sheep, 
has worthily carried off the first prize in his 
class. It is in a case of this kind that the 
relative spheres of the Smithfield Club and 
the Royal Agricultural Society of England 
come under observation. The former re¬ 
wards well-made fat meat, and encourages 
agriculture through the feeder, the latter aims 
