cre. In New York it was but 27
bushels, and in Pennsylvania but 20 bushels. It would certainly be
accounted extremely liberal to fix the average yield of such soils as need
draining, at 30 bushels per acre. It is extremely unlikely that they would
yield this, in the average of seasons, with the constantly recurring
injury from backward springs, summer droughts, and early autumn frosts.

Heavy, retentive soils, which are cold and late in the spring, subject to
hard baking in midsummer, and to become cold and wet in the early fall,
are the very ones which are best suited, when drained, to the growth of
Indian Corn. They are "strong" and fertile,--and should be able to absorb,
and to prepare for the use of plants, the manure which is applied to them,
and the fertilizing matters which are brought to them by each storm;--but
they cannot properly exercise the functions of fertile soils, for the
reason that they are strangled with water, chilled by evaporation, or
baked to almost brick-like hardness, during nearly the whole period of the
growth and ripening of the crop. The manure which has been added to them,
as well as their own chemical constituents, are prevented from undergoing
those changes which are necessary to prepare them for the uses of
vegetation. The water of rains, finding the spaces in the soil already
occupied by the water of previous rains, cannot enter to deposit the gases
which it contains,--or, if the soil has been dried by evaporation under the
influence of sun and wind, the surface is almost hermetically sealed, and
the water is only slowly soaked up, much of it running off over the
surface, or lying to be removed by the slow and chilling process of
evaporation. In wet times and in dry, the air, with its heat, its oxygen,
and its carbonic acid, (its universal solvent,) is forbidden to enter and
do its beneficent work. The benefit resulting from cultivating the surface
of the ground is counteracted by the first unfavorable change of the
weather; a single heavy rain, by saturating the soil, returning it to
nearly its original condition of clammy compactness. In favorable seasons,
these difficulties are lessened, but man has no control over the seasons,
and to-morrow may be as foul as to-day has been fair. A crop of corn on
undrained, retentive ground, is subject to injury from disastrous changes
of the weather, from planting until harvest. Even supposing that, in the
most favorable seasons, it would yield as