The Vermont watchman. [volume] (Montpelier, Vt.) 1883-1911, 1889-04-10
Some Editorial Comments.


animal, are made of "the dust of the
earth !" and although in the early times,
when men were few, the land gave its
increase in excess of all their needs,
yet as soon as population, even upon
limited areas and in the most fertile
valley lands, like those of Mesopo-
tamia and Egypt, began to be crowded,
famine came and starvation often
stared men in the face Ease and cheap
ness of transportation, overland as
well as by sea, now render famine less
threatening; but according to theories
which were almost undsputed as lately
as fifty years ago, and still have weight
with many, the human race must in
crease much more rapidly than its
means of subsistence, and it remains
only question of time when mankind
must be confronted by starvation on all
sides. Able reasoners have shown
many fallacies in the chain of argu-
ment upon which this prediction was
based. 1t has been proved that the
food resources of the earth and sea
have been greatly underestimate, and
that, so far as vegetable food is con-
cerned, the time, when the earth will
not be able to sustain its human popu-
lation is very far removed from our
times.
Nevertheless, agricultural art in its
present state, the world over, is so de-
fective in point of practical skill, and so
utterly unrelieved by scientific knowl-
edge among the cultivators themselves,
that the waste is immense upon even
the very best conducted farms. But it
would be manifestly unjust to punish
the farmers, and still more the rest of
mankind, merely for ignorance. We
may therefore suppose that although
natural resources as they have long
existed are, and might long continue
to be, ample 10 feed mankind, yet
Providence has provided in advance a
remedy unimagined by Nautilus and his
school, in the immense stores of plant
food found stored in the earth, to say
nothing of the resources offered by the
sea and the immense saving of organic
materials resulting from economy in the
utilization of animal and mineral wastes
in the great slaugbtering and manufac-
turing businesses which progressive civ
ilization has developed.
The agricultural press has its most
important duty in impressing upon its
public the necessity for far more
scrupulous economy in the saving and
utilization of farm wastes, and of the
organic stores, such as peat or muck,
waste vegetation, ETC., which are avail
able in many places. 1t should not fail,
either, in teaching the use of wood
ashes, leached and unleached, and the
occasional value of mineral renovators,
such as lime, plaster and green-sand
marl where these are cheaply access
ible. 1t has an equally important func-
ton in teaching its readers how to de-
velop the latent elements of fertility in
the soil by tillage, and how to bring its
deeper buried resources within the reach
of shallow-rooted crops by alternating
them with deep-rooting ones, among
which clover and alfalfa are so con-
spicuous. 1t is upon the wide spread of
correct knowledge upon all these sub
jects that our agricultural developme MT,
and the prosperity of our farmers as
body, greatly depend. Were we who
live by the land" as cultivators,
fully possessed of the knowledge, in
an available form for use, which al
ready exists on these subjects, the ques-
lions relating to another class of fer
tilizing materials might be indefinitely
postponed.
But Providence makes provision for
ignorance, and does not ask for an ac-
count of stewardships of which we are
not fully conscious. Our ancestors in
America were given possession of a
virgin soil, requiring only to be " tickled
WIN q ioO w Wioii ioi NNots
and now, being yet mostly ignorant of
the resources which remain in our
hands, there are revealed to us, out of
the bosom of the earth, immense stores
of plant food to replace that which has
been unwittingly wasted. From the
phosphate rocks, and the phosphate
Stag which is so large by-product in
the smelling of iron, an essential ele-
ment of organic life, phosphorus, the
basis of brain and bone, may be pro-
fusely supplied to the soil of our farms
and gardens. The more recent discov,
cry, in the upper layers of great salt
beds, of immense deposits of potash
relieves anxiety in regard to the impov-
erishment of many otherwise good soils
by the abstraction, through removed
crops, of a substance as essential to the
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