The _Long Island Agronomist_, in a recent issue, tells of one of these materials which comes from New Jersey, and consists of innumerable rootlets, leaf-fibres and vegetable matter of all descriptions. It is gathered from the peatbogs of New Jersey and is really the wash from mountains and hills carried down by streams in freshet times, until some level was reached where this deposit was made. When spread on the land or mixed with the earth, it is found to hold much moisture, for each particle swells up as if it were a sponge, and the crops planted on soil treated with this preparation do remarkably well. It was so very expensive at first as to be almost prohibitive except for very valuable crops, but the price is now such that many a man can afford to use it, especially if he cannot afford the time or space to grow his own green manure. Nothing looks nicer about a house than a green lawn, with smooth-cropped, velvety surface, but nothing is harder to maintain after a few years of cropping. This is because a well-kept lawn is carefully raked after each clipping, and is kept free from falling leaves or other vegetable waste matter. It must be admitted that the general effect is better, particularly when the lawn stretches from the front of the house to the roadside. But the lawn is, nevertheless, being starved, and though watered every day it cannot keep up its velvety surface indefinitely, unless supplied with the food it needs. This is Nature’s own secret for replenishing the earth with good crops, and all you need do is to observe what is going on around you, to find daily proof of it. To quote Mr. Seeds again: “Every two years, we ought to sow clean blue grass or lawn grass seed over the lawn. I prefer to mow often and leave the clippings on the lawn. It is the blanket and vegetable matter that will do the lawn good. Every few years I cover the lawn with barnyard manure, in the fall; let it lie there all winter and that which we rake off in the spring we put on the garden. This is a little trouble, but I want to say that I made more money creating my lawn than I ever did in taking a fat ox from the stall, or a bushel of potatoes from my cellar. “A man will stand on the public road in front of my place, and give me more for my property on account of my lawn; but money is not the only thing in the world. The lawn makes the boys and girls want to stay on the farm. It is on our lawn that we spend our spare moments on Sundays, entertaining our friends, in the summer; and there, beneath the shade of ‘the old apple-tree,’ the smoke curls more beautifully from my chimney than from any other I ever saw.”