=155.= AGRICULTURE AS A SCIENCE.
That agriculture may become a science, it is indispensable that man always repay to the great bank from which he has drawn his food, the debt he thereby has contracted. The earth, as has been already said, gives nothing, but is ready to lend everything; and when the debts are punctually repaid, each successive loan is made on a larger scale; but when the debtor fails in punctuality, his credit declines, and the loans are gradually diminished, until at length he is turned out from house and home. No truth in the whole range of science is more readily susceptible of proof than that the community which limits itself to the exportation of raw produce must end by the exportation of men, and those men the slaves of nature, even when not actually bought and sold by their fellow men.
… With the growth of commerce, the necessity for moving commodities back, and forth steadily declines, with constant improvement in the machinery of transportation, and diminution in the risk of losses of the kind that are covered by insurance against dangers of the sea, or those of fire. The treasures of the earth then become developed, and stone and iron take the place of wood in all constructions, while the exchanges between the miner of coal and of iron—of the man who quarries the granite, and him who raises the food—rapidly increase in quantity, and diminish the necessity for resorting to the distant market.
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=Edmund Ruffin, 1793-1863.=
From "An Essay on Calcarcous Manures."
=156.= IMPROVEMENT OF ACID SOILS.
Nearly all the woodland now remaining in lower Virginia, and also much of the land which has long been arable, is rendered unproductive by acidity; and successive generations have toiled on such land, almost without remuneration, and without suspecting that their worst virgin land was then richer than their manured lots appeared to be. The cultivator of such soil, who knows not its peculiar disease, has no other prospect than a gradual decrease of his always scanty crops. But if the evil is once understood, and the means of its removal are within his reach, he has reason to rejoice that his soil was so constituted as to be preserved from the effects of the improvidence of his forefathers, who would have worn out any land not almost indestructible. The presence of acid, by restraining the productive powers of the soil, has, in a great measure, saved it from exhaustion; and after a course of cropping, which would have utterly ruined soils much better constituted, the powers of our acid land remain not greatly impaired, though dormant, and ready to be called into action by merely being relieved of its acid quality. A few crops will reduce a new acid field to so low a rate of product, that it scarcely will pay for its cultivation; but no great change is afterwards caused, by continuing scourging tillage and grazing, for fifty years longer. Thus our acid soils have two remarkable and opposite qualities,—both proceeding from the same cause; they can neither be enriched by manure, nor impoverished by cultivation, to any great extent. Qualities so remarkable deserve all our powers of investigation; yet their very frequency seems to have caused them to be overlooked; and our writers on agriculture have continued to urge those who seek improvement, to apply precepts drawn from English authors, to soils which are totally different from all those for which their instructions were intended.
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=Francis Wayland, 1796-1865.= (Manual, pp. 487, 502, 504.)