I do not know a rood of our country's surface so rich in _all_ the materials which enter into the production of the Grains, Grasses, Fruits, and Vegetables, which are the objects and rewards of cultivation, that it could not be improved by the application of fertilizers; if there be such, I heartily congratulate the owners, and advise them not to sell. Nor do I believe that there are many acres so fertile that they would not produce more Indian Corn, more Hemp, more Cotton, and more of whatever may be their appropriate staple, if judiciously fertilized. If there be farms or fields originally so good that manure would not increase their yield, I am confident that the first half-dozen crops will have taken that conceit out of them. Prairies and river-bottoms may yield ever so bounteously; but that very luxuriance of growth insures their gradual exhaustion of certain elements of crops, which must needs be replaced or their product will dwindle. Whoever has sold a thousand bushels of grain, or its equivalent in meat, from his farm, has thereby impoverished that farm, unless he has applied something that balances its loss. "I perceive that virtue has gone out of me," observed the Saviour, because the hem of his garment had been touched; and every field that had been cropped might make a similar report whenever its annual loss by abstraction has not been balanced by some kind of fertilizer. The farmer who grows the largest crops is the most merciless exhauster of the soil, unless he balances his annual drafts (as good farmers rarely fail to do) by at least equal reenforcements of the productive capacity of his fields.