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The Renewal of Fertility In rational systems of general farming the supply of any element which is normally very abundant may be renewed from the subsoil by even the very slight erosion which occurs on all ordinary lands in humid sections. This statement applies to iron and potassium, and often to magnesium.

This is one of the cases in which the gardener may well make the best of however bad a bargain he has. But supposing that a selection be possible, a light sandy loam, underlaid by a porous subsoil so as to be well drained, should be given the preference, since it is warmed quickly, easily worked, and may be stirred early in the season and after a rain.

The subsoil ploughing; the pheasants and poaching; the row about the representation of the county; the Earl of Mangelwurzelshire being at variance with his relative and nominee, the Honourable Marmaduke Tomnoddy; all these I could put down, had I a mind to violate the confidence of private life; and a great deal of conversation about the weather, the Mangelwurzelshire Hunt, new manures, and eating and drinking, of course.

The soil is a yellow silty soil, resembling loess in texture, underlaid by a clay subsoil with layers or pockets of sand. This soil has been cultivated for upward of two hundred years, but it is now little valued and is covered with oak and pine over much of its area. It is worth from $1 to $3 per acre. The cultivated areas produce small crops of corn, wheat, and an inferior grade of tobacco."

The scenery of a long tragic drama flashed through his mind as the lightning-express-train whishes by a station: the gradual dismantling process of disease; friends looking on, sympathetic, but secretly chuckling over their own stomachs of iron and lungs of caoutchouc; nurses attentive, but calculating their crop, and thinking how soon it will be ripe, so that they can go to your neighbor, who is good for a year or so longer; doctors assiduous, but giving themselves a mental shake, as they go out of your door, that throws off your particular grief as a duck sheds a rain-drop from his oily feathers; undertakers solemn, but happy; then the great subsoil cultivator, who plants, but never looks for fruit in his garden; then the stone-cutter, who finds the lie that has been waiting for you on a slab ever since the birds or beasts made their tracks on the new red sandstone; then the grass and the dandelions and the buttercups, Earth saying to the mortal body, with her sweet symbolism, "You have scarred my bosom, but you are forgiven"; then a glimpse of the soul as a floating consciousness without very definite form or place, but dimly conceived of as an upright column of vapor or mist several times larger than life-size, so far as it could be said to have any size at all, wandering about and living a thin and half-awake life for want of good old-fashioned solid matter to come down upon with foot and fist, in fact, having neither foot nor fist, nor conveniences for taking the sitting posture.

We should naturally suppose that that of Eden was a deep sandy loam, with not too porous a subsoil. As we have already seen again and again, such a soil appears to be the laboratory in which we can assist Nature to develop her best products.

At the hottest season of the year, if you were to dig down a few feet, you would come to a subsoil which is locked in the embrace of perpetual frost. Some signs of natives were discovered here, and, from the appearance of the cut trees, it was evident that they possessed no iron tools.

"With your ordinary soil, carrying twelve hundred and seventy pounds of phosphorus, perhaps you may be able by a liberal use of decaying organic matter to liberate ten or fifteen pounds of phosphorus, or sufficient for a crop of forty to sixty bushels of corn; and, with a subsoil richer in phosphorus than the surface, and with more or less of the partially depleted surface removed by erosion year by year, the supply of phosphorus is thus permanently provided for unless the bed rock is brought too near the surface.

But why should any girl be interested in farming? Teaching is such a cultured profession. Only a moment just while he was sorting the papers upon which they had made the computations, but a hundred thoughts had passed through her mind. Now he was speaking. "You remember we took a sample of the subsoil on the sloping land.

In one respect they congratulated themselves that they should be better off than many of the whalers in the polar seas, for as it is impossible to get below the surface of a frozen ocean, these adventurers have to seek refuge in huts of wood and snow erected on their ships, which at best can give but slight protection from extreme cold; but here, with a solid subsoil, the Gallians might hope to dig down a hundred feet or so and secure for themselves a shelter that would enable them to brave the hardest severity of climate.