The glaciers, moving over thousands of miles and often meeting and dumping their loads together on vast fields, did the very same thing for everybody that England does for herself to-day in bringing different kinds of fertilizers from all over the world to enrich her farms. I'm very glad to speak of this because the author of the story of the pebble may have left a bad impression of the glaciers--"The Old Men of the Mountain"--as farmers, by what he said about their carrying off the original farm lands of New England, and leaving a lot of pebbles and boulders instead. While these pebbles have not produced what you would call a brilliant performer among soils, they have made a good, steady soil that in New England has helped greatly in growing farm boys into famous men, while the pebbles of Wisconsin have been of immense service to her famous cows. In the counties in Wisconsin where there are plenty of pebbles scattered through the soil, the production of cheese and butter is something like 50 per cent greater than it is in regions where there are comparatively few pebbles.[35] [35] Martin: "Physiography of Wisconsin." [Illustration: _From Tarr and Martin's "College Physiography." By permission of the Macmillan Company_ GOOD CROPS FROM NEW ENGLAND'S STONY FIELDS While the stones, big and little, with which the fields of New England are so richly supplied have not produced what you would call a brilliant performer among soils, they have made a good steady soil that can turn its hand to almost anything, and that has helped greatly in growing farm boys into famous men. In building those stone fences, for example, the boys learned that it always pays to do your work well. A hundred years is merely the tick of a watch in the life of a fence like that!] The soils of New England are like the New Englander himself, they can turn their hands to almost anything; raise any kind of crop suited to the climate, while richer soils are often not so versatile. The reason is that these pebbles were originally gathered by the glaciers from widely separated river-beds, and so contain all varieties of rock with every kind of plant food in them. It takes a long, long time to make soil out of bed-rock, but in the case of soils in which there are a great many pebbles it is different; and you can see why. On a great mass of rock there is comparatively little surface for the air and other pioneer soil-makers to get at, and so decay is slow; while the same amount of rock broken up into pebbles presents a great deal of surface for decay.