dent of the
United States he could not learn anything from a specialist. The trait
was most commendable and one that is sadly lacking in many of his
countrymen, some of whom take pride in declaring that "these here
scientific fellers caint tell me nothin' about raisin' corn!"

Young and Sir John Sinclair were by no means his only agricultural
correspondents. Even Noah Webster dropped his legal and philological
work long enough in 1790 to propound a theory so startlingly modern in
its viewpoint that it is worthy of reproduction. Said he:

"While therefore I allow, in its full extent, the value of stable
manure, marl, plaster of Paris, lime, ashes, sea-weed, sea-shells &
salt, in enriching land, I believe none of them are absolutely
necessary, but that nature has provided an inexhaustible store of
manure, which is equally accessible to the rich and the poor, & which
may be collected & applied to land with very little labor and expense.
This store is the _atmosphere_, & the process by which the fertilizing
substance may be obtained is vegetation."

He added that such crops as oats, peas, beans and buckwheat should be
raised and plowed under to rot and that land should never be left bare.
As one peruses the letter he recalls that scientists of to-day tell us
that the air is largely made up of nitrogen, that plants are able to
"fix it," and he half expects to find Webster advocating "soil
innoculation" and speaking of "nodules" and "bacteria."

Throughout the period after the Revolution our Farmer's one greatest
concern was to conserve and restore his land. When looking for a new
manager he once wrote that the man must be, "above all, Midas like, one
who can convert everything he touches into manure, as the first
transmutation toward gold; in a word, one who can bring worn-out and
gullied lands into good tilth in the shortest time." He saved manure as
if it were already so much gold and hoped with its use and with
judicious rotation of crops to accomplish his object. "Unless some such
practice as this prevails," he wrote in 1794, "my fields will be growing
worse and worse every year, until the Crops will not defray the expense
of the culture of them."

He drew up elaborate plans for the rotation of crops on his different
farms. Not content with one plan, he often drew up several alternatives;
calculated the probable financial returns from each, allowing for the
cost of seed, cultivation and other expenses, and commented