Practical papers—Soils. 
365 
furnished as plant food, to be worked up subsequently into plant 
forms. Here we find those kindred ties that unite these two king¬ 
doms or departments of nature. Here, too, we find that most 
neglected but most interesting and important department of agri¬ 
cultural science. The knowledge is more important to the farmer 
than that furnished by geological investigations; and when 
farming is brought more under the application of scientific prin¬ 
ciples in this direction, it will become not only one of the most 
productive and profitable branches of industry, but a branch of 
industry that will be chosen by our young men as the most con¬ 
ducive to health, wealth, independence and intellectual culture, 
and worthy the best talent of the age. 
SOILS —THEIR PRESERVATION AND RENOVATION. 
Read before the State Agricultural Convention, in February, 1873. 
BY SECRETARY W. W. FIELD, BOSCOBEL. 
In presenting a brief paper upon the above important subject, 
I shall not expect, or even attempt, to furnish anything new in the 
science or practice of agriculture, but simply urge upon the 
farmers of this state the importance of maintaining the original 
fertility of their new lands, and of renovating their old or partially 
exhausted fields, and give some of the practical ways and means 
by which this can be accomplished. If I can stimulate thought 
and discussion by this convention, and among a few even of the 
producers jof the state, by the presentation of a few ideas and 
suggestions which have come within the range of my observation 
in an experience of twenty years of farming in Wisconsin, and am 
able to present such facts as many of the farmers of the state full 
well know, but which most of them have totally disregarded, and 
can impress upon them the vital importance of heeding them in 
the future, and of practising a more economical and better system 
of culture, I shall feel that the time spent in the preparation of 
