Norwich bulletin., 1911-06-17

(Written Specially for the Builetin)
 On little calendar which a good friend in Norwich sent me. last win ter. appears this sentence which has been looking me in the eye for the last month-'I believe in Patience, because 1t is the swiftest means to secure results Not the surest. you'll notice; not the safest; not the easiest, merely, but ttfe "swiftest"
 I don't know how many millions ot millenniums it took God to make this world, as it is. He doesn't seem to have kept a dated diary of His work for publication and my friend the geologist frankly admits that he hasn't any real knowledge. All that the books of the rocks tell him is that it has been more millions of years than human mind can comprehend since the thing began. He intimateS that there is reason to suppose that the world is changing and making, now, about as rapidly as it ever did. If that be true, then the most impressive thing about all this great globe is the infinite and incompre'hensible Patience which is in its granite framework and it's scurf of soil and its summer garment of greenness.
 Yet it is perfectly clear that Om- impotence might have created the world, just as it is. with one whisper. If Omnipotence didn't do that but chose, instead, to accomplish the end DN an uIlitDdSlfldDiN SiOW pTpCcSS Oi ages and aeons and eternities, it is because the Being who is All-wise as well as Allpowerful saw His own di- vine Patience the surest and swiftest meaps to secure results.
 But we farmers, as rule, want to get results tomorrow. if not this after noon. We can't wait. We are like children. hungering while mother opens the jam-pot. We hop around first on one leg and then on the other in our excitement, and feel ourselves distinctly aggrieved if she doesn't get the cover off and the paraffined paper removed. and the stuff spooned out before we can say, Min" twice Furthermore, and worst of all, we want Mother Nature to get a dozen different kinds of jam at the same on ladling out jam after the pot has been most completely enptied,-emp- tied and scraped, and wiped dry.
 Lots of US treat our farms like the jam-pot in that parable. We scoop out of them and lick off them all there originally was in them, and kick like steers because there ain't no more jam" We complain because they are all run out" and we can't get mo more such crops as father used to get Some of the most nearly wise of us, after mulling it over long enough, discover at last, that we can't empty our jam-pots unless we have first filled them, So we set to work to build up the old farms. That's one time when patience begins to be call ed for. It took God and Nature, to get our farms ready for crop grow ing, more years than any my geologist friend can get on a whole blackboard in string of figures reaching from end to end and from top to bottom. We shovel out of the farm in fifty or a hundred years about all that He used untold billions of years to put in it, and then think that we are going to fill 'er up again and make the robbed acres as good as new by a single sea- sons dosing of this, that, or the other soil nostrum We seem to think that we can do In day what it took God ten thousand years to accomplish.
 This shows considerable self-conf- dence. But it isn't to he commended as really good Judgement.
 Taking farms as they run and years as they go, it is a blamed sight easier to keep the farm up than it is to build il up. It is easier to keep a good farm in good condition than 1t is to put a wornout farm into good condition Moreover. it is a great deal cheaper, and much more profitable.
 Tho fertilizer dealers tell us that we want to put back upon and into our soils nitrogen and phosphorus and potash They make up their fertiIi- gers on that basis.--so much of each of these three constituents. But the agricultural chemist, when he analy- ses soil to It's ultimate clements. finds in it not only these three minerals. but forty or fifty more in smaller pro- portions. silicon and iron and sodium and chlorine and magnesium and lime and whole lot more too numerous to mention. Furthermore. he finds all these in varying conditions and com binations. Your plant can't use pure nitrogen nor pure potash. They hava to be so combined and in such shape that the plant can assimilate them or ic +t,i i=