ATMOSPHERE. 
driven from the climate of a district by thorough 
cultivation, is provided for by the disappearance 
of the stagnant waters and the bibulous and 
spongy surfaces whence the local atmosphere was 
formerly charged with vapour. When all the 
land of a district has been thoroughly drained, 
and all its ascending and accumulating waters 
either drawn off to a river-course, or gathered 
into such small deep pools as present compara- 
tively trivial scope for evaporation, the local at- 
mosphere receives less vapour, acquires increase 
of capacity for direct solar heat, and obtains a 
larger amount of radiated heat from the ground ; 
so that, though the same quantity of rain fall 
annually as before, the stratum of air immedi- 
ately over the soil, or the actual climate of the 
district, will possess a far higher degree of both 
dryness and heat. Hence, the foulness of our 
pastures, the poverty and lateness of our crops, 
the stiffness of our carses, the miriness of our 
| loams, the wetness of our vegetable moulds, the 
| spoutiness and rankness of our meadows, the 
| blights upon our crops, the occasional pestilences 
upon our flocks, and the frequent coughs and 
fevers and consumptions of our families, ought, 
in multitudes of instances, to be ascribed, not to 
the raininess of our climate, the fickleness of our 
| seasons, or the chilly dampness of our atmo- 
sphere, but either mainly or solely to the bad 
agricultural condition of the soil. Let the ground 
be effectually drained, and the heart of the air 
upon the farm will be immediately and perma- 
nently warmed ; and rain, while sent in due quan- 
tity to refresh the fields, will no longer lie upon 
their surface or stagnate within their bosom, to 
| poison the suffused atmosphere with fogs and 
miasmata. An increase of atmospheric heat with- 
out a corresponding drainage of terrestrial sur- 
face, would not only be useless but most malign. 
The coughs, asthmas, consumptions, and inter- 
mittent fevers which arise from the cold, damp 
air of a churlish and niggard country, are mild 
in their character and gentle in their operation 
compared to the fierce fevers, the murderous 
diarrhoeas, and the fell and furious inflammations 
which scourge the population of a warm damp 
air in regions of moist, rank, luxuriant vegeta- 
tion. The agues of our own fenny districts are 
playthings in comparison to the red-hot pests 
and plagues which desolate the low wet regions 
of the Levant and the tropics. About a century 
ago, a wind which sweeps across the vast swamps 
and oozy mangrove thickets of the sultry plains 
of Benin, and rushes down with their loads of 
putrid vegetable exhalations upon the coast of 
Guinea, made such wholesale havoc upon the 
towns of negro-land, that the surviving were not 
numerous enough to bury the dead. But the con- 
siderations of climate are so numerous, so intri- 
cate, and of such mighty connexion with agricul- 
ture, that they must form the topic of a separate 
article. See the article Ciimatr. 
_ Economical Relations of the Atmosphere—The 
I 
289 
agencies of the atmosphere act in intimate con- 
nexion with all organic functions and very many 
mineral changes in our world; and therefore 
affect the interests and occupations of the culti- 
vators of the soil at a thousandfold too many 
points, or in a thousandfold too many ways, to 
be mentioned or even hinted at in a brief general 
notice. Some of the chief are more or less fully 
discussed in our articles AgricuLTURAL CHEMIS- 
TRY, VEGETABLE Puystonoay, AiR, Oxya@nn, CaR- 
Bonic Acip, Ammonia, Azotr, Hat, CuIMats, 
Rain, Snow, and Arration; and others form the 
topic of a considerable portion of many of our 
other articles. We shall here do no more than 
state a few practical inferences, bearing upon the 
health, comfort, and professional success of gar- 
deners and farmers. : 
The sites of dwelling-houses and of farmeries 
ought to be selected in places remote from ponds, 
marshes, and stagnant waters. The apartments 
of dwelling-houses ought to be spacious and easily 
ventilated; and no dormitories for servants or 
buildings for the housing of cattle should be low, 
moist, or excluded from free and frequent circu- 
lation of the air. The temperature of inhabited 
apartments ought to be graduated, and ought 
never to rise above 64° of Fahrenheit; and the 
temperature of dormitories ought, as nearly as 
possible, to be uniform throughout the night, 
and ought never-—as too frequently happens— 
to make the wide and very trying range of a rise 
or fall of 10° between the hour of going to bed 
and the hour of rising. Females ought in all 
cold weather to be warmly and tidily clad, and 
to avoid the hazardous practice of a sudden re- 
duction of dress on a gala-day or gala-night. The 
use of footstoves poisons the air of rooms, induces 
indolent habits, and transforms healthy females 
into delicate and drooping invalids. A few trees 
around a dwelling or a farmery modify the fever- | 
ish heats of summer, carry off a portion of the 
caloric with the moisture they exhale, and offer 
a degree of shade which is frequently sufficient 
to avert or lessen lassitude. 
All seeds ought to be deposited so near the 
surface of the soil as to be freely fanned by the 
atmospheric air, and, at the same time, so far be- 
low the surface as to obtain a sufficiency of mois- 
ture for their germination. When small seeds 
are buried unduly deep from the air, they either 
utterly rot, or germinate so feebly as never to 
send their plumules to the surface.—Soils, when 
loose and pulverulent, are very bibulous of water, 
and readily transmit the dews which fall upon 
them to the roots of plants; but when they pos- 
sess a compact constitution, or are unpulverized 
by tillage, or are skinned and incrusted by alter- 
nations of rain and sunshine, they reject most 
rain in multitudinous rills of surface, and permit 
almost all dew to be dissipated by the earliest 
rays of the morning sun. Hence, all land which 
is under drilled and hoed crops ought to be fre- 
quently stirred and kept permeable to the atmo- 
T 
