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Updated: June 6, 2025
Some may have been placed there by the old builders instead of mortar; but we should remember that worms line their burrows with black humus. Moreover open spaces would almost certainly have been occasionally left between the large irregular flints; and these spaces, we may feel sure, would be filled up by the worms with their castings, as soon as they were able to penetrate the wall.
Thus we observe in the ocean a circulation takes place without the addition or subtraction of any element, unlimited in duration, although limited in extent, inasmuch as in a confined space the nourishment of plants exists in a limited quantity. We well know that marine plants cannot derive a supply of humus for their nourishment through their roots.
In spite of numerous windows and lofty doors, the air was constantly fouled by the smells from the washing-place, the hairdressing, the lockers, and the thousand messes made by the boys, to say nothing of their eighty closely packed bodies. And this sort of humus, mingling with the mud we brought in from the playing-yard, produced a suffocatingly pestilent muck-heap.
Plants which are limited in nature to sandy, sun-scorched plains or the glaring sides of rocky hills and mountains, where scarcely any other form of vegetation can exist, are not likely to require much decayed vegetable humus, but must obtain their food from inorganic substances, such as loam, sand, or lime. So it is with them when grown in our houses.
There rise the gray scarred cliffs, crowned here and there with a dead hemlock or pine, where, morning after morning, I have seen the bald-eagle perch, and here at their feet this level area of tender humus, with three perennial springs of delicious cold water flowing in its margin; a huge granite bowl filled with the elements and potencies of life.
The soil is not all of one character, it seldom is so on any one farm in this country, but it is all good class. Most of it is a rich black humus, resting on clay and mountain limestone. In configuration it is of the roughest, like the country generally, being an abrupt succession of ranges, gullies, and basins, in every variety of form and size.
"No, it is not so poor in mineral plant food on the sloping areas, but even there it is extremely poor in humus and nitrogen. However, I fear I could not enjoy farming in irregular patches of five or ten acres, and the level lands of Virginia and Maryland are so exceedingly poor, that much time and money and work will be required to put them on a paying basis.
When a forest is cleared there is a spongy humus on the ground surface that is extremely rich, but this washes away in a single season. The soil beneath is good, but thin on the hillsides, and its soluble, fertile ingredients soon leach out and vanish. As one of my neighbors put it: "Thar, I've cl'ared me a patch and grubbed hit out now I can raise me two or three severe craps!" "Then what?"
Straw, by its decay in the soil, produces humus and, therefore acts in the same way just as does the decay of other forms of vegetation. As, however, straw is less easily decomposed than fresh vegetation, it is less valuable and may be troublesome by acquiring a greater amount of moisture by interfering with cultivation or by tending to dry out the soil to the injury of other plants.
They had known that land dry and sterile, covered with mere scrub; they beheld it now one sea of waving corn, of crops whose growth increased at each successive season. Up yonder, on the old marshy plateau, the fertility was such, thanks to the humus amassed during long centuries, that Mathieu did not even manure the ground as yet.
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