Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 6, 2025
The lake bed a plain of till was spread smooth and level as a floor with lacustrine silts. Since Lake Agassiz vanished with the melting back of the ice beyond the outlet by the Nelson River into Hudson Bay, there has gathered on its floor a deep humus, rich in the nitrogenous elements so needful for the growth of plants, and it is to this soil that the region owes its well-known fertility.
The next day, while our carriers were engaged in clearing this trail, Professor Foote collected a large number of insects, including eight new species of moths and butterflies. I inspected Saavedra's plantation. The soil having lain fallow for centuries, and being rich in humus, had produced more sugar cane than he could grind.
If it were not capable of surviving and flourishing under conditions fatal to most plants it could not contribute its quota to the formation of humus favourable to the progress of the advancing hosts of tropical vegetation. A weird and stealthy process is this invasion of the ocean, which leads to the alteration and amendment of the surface of the globe.
Hence we see that in examining the calorific effects of clearing forests, it is important to take into account the properties of the soil laid bare." The hygroscopicity of humus or vegetable earth is much greater than that of any mineral soil, and consequently forest ground, where humus abounds, absorbs the moisture of the atmosphere more rapidly and in larger proportion than common earth.
Decomposition then sets in with the help of microbes, fungi and microarthropods. Microarthropods are of two kinds-the detritivores that feed on the litter attacked by the microbes and fungi and the predators that feed on the detritivores. The litter that has not been decomposed, dead microbes and microarthropods, along with their excretions and secretions, mix and form humus.
There is first the supply of unfailing moisture, with a yearly subsoiling of humus unknown to arid lands. Canada is super-sensitive about her winter climate the depth and intensity of the frost, the length and rigor of her winters; but she need not be. It should be cause of gratitude.
The maximum length is three miles by about the same breadth, and the circumference, including the indentations, may be fifteen. The surface is rolling composed of humus and clay, corallines and shelly conglomerates based on tertiary limestone and perhaps sandstone; dwarf clearings alternate with tracts of bush grass, and with a bushy second growth, lacking large trees.
The Romans did not have the fight against sour land which is the heritage of the modern farmer after years of continuous application to his land of phosphoric and sulphuric acid in the form of mineral fertilizers. What sour land the Romans had they corrected with humus making barnyard manure, or the rich compost which Cato and Columella recommend.
Then a bedlam of deafening sound burst forth anew, a mighty deluge of unbearable noise as the millions of tons of pulverized rock, humus and metal fell back. Some of it had ascended for miles; it settled amid a howling blizzard snow that melted as it touched the madly churned airfield. High above there were ten planes flying about uncertainly.
The slender occasional supply after the beeches were cut was rain-water which soaked through the superficial humus and oozed out at the old orifices, carrying the taste and temperature of the vegetable soil with it; the more abundant and grateful water which flowed before the beeches were cut, and after the firs were well grown, came from a deeper source and had been purified, and cooled to the mean temperature of the locality, by filtering through strata of mineral earth.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking