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Updated: May 8, 2025
Every farm has a series of big ditches, three to six feet wide and about five feet deep, running across it. The water is drained off the land with tile into these ditches, but on the other hand these ditches provide with the aforesaid tile a form of sub-irrigation inasmuch as the water in the dry season flows back into the sub-soil through these same tile.
The kicking and pawing of the moss-covered ground with their spade-like feet tear it up, level it, and cut off the dense moss and creeping plants, bring the sub-soil to the top, and over the whole the big herd spreads a good covering of manure. Reindeer-trodden barrens, after a short rest, yield more grass and cattle food than ever before.
At any rate, a stream of some sort could not be far away. In fact, during the last miles of the journey the nature of the earth had been modified. The declivities diminished and became damp. Here and there ran narrow streams, which indicated that the sub-soil enclosed everywhere a watery network.
Such is the human species, which represents the culminating point of the evolution of the vertebrates. But such also are, in the series of the articulate, the insects and in particular certain hymenoptera. It has been said of the ants that, as man is lord of the soil, they are lords of the sub-soil.
This is rendered almost certain by the following weights of the castings thrown up at the mouths of single burrows; the whole of which appeared to have been ejected within no long time, as was certainly the case in several instances. The largest casting which I could find on the flanks of a steep valley, the sub-soil being here shallow.
It was as though a magician had passed a sheet before them the brief instant necessary to work his great transformation. Shortly the sky thickened again, and it began to rain. Travel had been precarious before; but now its difficulties were infinitely increased. The clay sub-soil to the rubble turned slippery and adhesive. On the sides of the mountains it was almost impossible to keep a footing.
On the flats we found a great number of ant-hills, remarkable for their height and size; they were of various forms, but chiefly conical, some of them rose ten feet high. From the appearance of the ant-hills I should take the sub-soil to be of a reddish clay. August 23. We camped by the side of a creek running to the westward, with rather a broad bed, and steep banks of strong clay.
For these reasons our choice of a soil for the lowest cost a bushel and probably for a maximum yield should be a rich sandy or sandy loam surface soil overlying a well-drained clay sub-soil. I would prefer one which was originally covered with a heavy growth of beech and maple timber, though I should want it to be "old land" at the time.
Quite a number of trees have died, I presume from old age. I desire to remove them and to replace them with prune trees. I have been advised to use dynamite in preparing the soil for the planting of the new trees. Whether you need dynamite or not depends upon the condition of the sub-soil.
Beneath the brick rubbish the natural sandy soil, full of fragments of sandstone was found; and this could have yielded very little, if at all, to the weight of the stone, as might have been expected if the sub-soil had been clay.
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