. Popular science monthly. eworld is one vast garden, bringing forth crops of the most luxuriantand varied kind century after century, and millennium after millen-nium. Yet the face of Nature is nowhere furrowed by the plow, noharrow disintegrates the clods, no lime and phosphates are strewedupon its fields, no visible tillage of the soil improves the work onthe great worlds farm. Now, in reality there can not be crops, or successions of crops, with-out the most thorough agriculture ; and when we look more closelyinto nature we discover a system of husbandry of the most surprising 736 THE POPU
. Popular science monthly. eworld is one vast garden, bringing forth crops of the most luxuriantand varied kind century after century, and millennium after millen-nium. Yet the face of Nature is nowhere furrowed by the plow, noharrow disintegrates the clods, no lime and phosphates are strewedupon its fields, no visible tillage of the soil improves the work onthe great worlds farm. Now, in reality there can not be crops, or successions of crops, with-out the most thorough agriculture ; and when we look more closelyinto nature we discover a system of husbandry of the most surprising 736 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY kind. Nature does all things unobtrusively ; and it is only now thatwe are beginning to see the magnitude of these secret agriculturaloperations by which she does already all that man would wish toimitate, and to which his most scientific methods are but clumsy ap-proximations. In this great system of natural husbandry Nature uses agencies,implements, and tools of many kinds. There is the disintegrating. frost, that great natural harrow, which bursts asunder the clods by theexpansion during freezing of the moisture imprisoned in their is the communistic wind which scatters broadcast over the fieldsthe finer soil in clouds of summer dust. There is the rain which washesthe humus into the hollows, and scrapes bare the rocks for further THE WHITE ANT: A THEORY. 737 denudation. There is the air which, with its carbonic acid and oxy-gen, dissolves and decomposes the stubborn hills, and manufacturesout of them the softest soils of the valley. And there are the humicacids, generated through decay, which filter through the ground andmanure and enrich the new-made soils. But this is not all, nor is this enough ; to prepare a surface film,however rich, and to manure the soil beneath, will secure one crop, butnot a succession of crops. There must be a mixture and transferenceof these layers, and a continued mixture and transference kept up fromage to age. Th
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Keywords: ., bookcentury1800, bookdecade1870, booksubjectscience, bookyear1872
