BULLETIN OF THE BUSSEY INSTITUTION. 159 
tion than it really deserved. As has been seen already, the justice of 
it is strongly corroborated both by the experiments, the experience, 
and the practices above described. 
The question naturally suggests itself, What is the reason of this 
dearth of potash? Why is it that a fertilizer which has, compara- 
tively speaking, little repute in Europe, should be deemed essential 
here? Iam inclined to believe that the farmers’ notion is correct, 
namely, that the lack of potash has been occasioned by incessant 
cropping. At all events, that practice must have been one chief 
cause of the present exhaustion. In any country devoted to the 
rearing of stock, where the winters are so cold that cattle are kept 
housed during half the year and supported upon hay or other forage 
that has been taken off the land, much of the farm land must of 
necessity tend to be exhausted sooner or later, unless there should 
prevail a careful and thorough system of collecting and preserving the 
dung of the animals and of returning it to the fields, or unless a 
large proportion of the hay used were grown upon water-meadows. 
But, as is well known, no careful system of returning dung to the 
land has ever been generally practised in New England ; and with the 
exception of the interval farms on our rivers, and the salt marshes of 
the seaboard, scarcely any land is kept in good heart by matters 
brought to it by water; unless, indeed, by straining a point we in- 
clude in this category those favored districts where the so-called sea- 
manure, consisting of kelp, rock-weed, and various other sea-plants, 
can be procured. Hence the country has very generally come to 
suffer from lack of that kind of plant food which has been most com- 
pletely removed. No doubt but that other matters besides potash 
have been removed from the land by the practices above described, or 
that in many instances phosphates are needed also; but the evidence 
would seem to show that in the present case the supply of potash 
originally contained in the land has given out first. It is no great 
matter for surprise that this thing should have occurred in a country 
mainly devoted to grazing and the growth of forage. If New Eng- 
land had been a grain-growing country, phosphoric acid might, per- 
haps, have been its weakest point. It is to be remembered that the 
conditions of New England farming are peculiar, not only in respect 
to the severity of the climate and to the comparative violence of the 
rain-fall, but that many of the methods of culture that are pursued 
