he
same product. In the third place, if a certain amount of work upon a
certain field will give him twenty bushels of wheat, he must give a good
deal more than twice as much work in the way of tillage and manufactured
fertilizer to make a crop of forty bushels. The proof of this is clear in
the disposition of farmers to buy more land instead of to increase labor
upon a limited space possessed.

A specific statement of the law of diminishing returns is that _in the
cultivation of land an increased amount of effort under usual conditions
fails to give a correspondingly increased amount of produce_.

_Exceptions to law of diminishing returns._--Exceptions to this law are
easy to find, as where the first selection of land in a new country has
had reference rather to safety from wild beasts and savages or malarial
diseases than actual store of fertility. Another exception is found in any
new country, where imperfect adjustment of labor to conditions of soil and
climate are liable at the outset to prevent the full use of natural powers
of the soil. So evident are these two exceptions in imperfectly developed
agriculture that some have disputed the general fact, yet all must admit
the certainty of diminished returns from multiplication of the same kind
of efforts upon the same space, and general proof is abundant in all long
settled communities.

_Effect of improved farming._--Counteracting this tendency to diminishing
returns, and in many instances more than overcoming the difficulty, is a
tendency toward improved methods in farming by more perfect application of
labor to the soil, better developed crops, better adaptation of live stock
to culture, improved machinery of every sort, and more extended range of
operations in farming, reducing the restraints of space by improved
transportation and more economical use of natural fertilizers; in short,
by any improvement through which labor is made more directly effective in
either quantity or quality of agricultural products. The whole story of
the development of agriculture in all these ways furnishes abundant
illustration of this counteracting tendency. In some regions it has more
than counter-balanced the tendency to diminishing returns. Various staple
products, like wheat, show in their diminishing value the advance in
methods of culture and adjustment of labor to production.

_Diminishing values._--The above is only a particular illustration of the
general tendency of all