20 BULLETIN OF THE BUSSEY INSTITUTION. 
mostly from regions lying to the north. This drift skirts the feet of 
many hills, and forms extensive rounded knolls, or, often, hills of con- 
siderable elevation. Mixtures of the drift and sedentary soils natu- 
rally occur also. 
It is not a wheat region, but the soil is esteemed to be peculiarly 
well adapted for maize and potatoes. Very large crops of potatoes 
were formerly grown there. Forty or fifty years ago four hundred 
bushels of potatoes to the acre were sometimes harvested, but nowa- 
days one hundred and sixty or two hundred bushels are considered 
good crops. Fifty.or sixty bushels of corn to the acre is not an in- 
frequent yield at the present time, and rarely as much as one hundred 
bushels of shelled corn to the acre are still obtained. Formerly one 
hundred bushels of corn to the acre was not an infrequent yield. 
Gypsum has been much used with good effect on the high and dry 
land, but not on the low-lying river or creek bottoms. Mr. Camp has 
himself obtained excellent results with wheat, and grass seeded down 
with the wheat, by applying lime to the shaly soil ; and one of his friends 
recently harvested two hundred bushels of ears of corn, to the acre, 
from land that had been dressed with ammoniated superphosphate of 
lime, at the rate of about two hundred pounds to the acre. 
The small proportion of lime in the shales of the Chemung group 
was insisted upon long ago by Emmons,* in one of the Reports of the 
Survey of the Natural History of the State of New York. The fact 
is not peculiar, however, to these New York rocks. A number of 
analyses of Devonian Slates from various localities equally poor, or 
even poorer, in lime, are given in Roth’s “ Gesteins-Analysen,” and 
Daubeny f found the same thing to be true of several Welsh slates 
examined by him. Daubeny suggests, in this connection, that it is as 
true of lime as of phosphoric acid, that its absence from a rock would 
scem to indicate the want, and its deficiency the paucity at least, of 
lime-secreting beings. But it is possible of course that calcareous 
shells, or the like, may have once been commingled with the mud or 
ooze at the bottom of the sea from which the shales were formed, and 
have been afterwards removed by chemical means; that is to say, by 
the solvent action of sea-water or of carbonic acid. 
It will be noticed that the proportions of phosphoric acid observed 
* Emmons, E., Agriculture of New York, Albany, 1846, 1. 193. 
t “Journal London Chemical Society,” 1855, 7. 296. 
