Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 85.djvu/384

380 to plant development; under irrigation, or where the situation is such as to result in permanent water a short distance below the surface, fine crops will be produced on sandy soils that would remain almost barren if they only depended upon the rainfall for their water. In western Europe large areas of heaths and waste land owe their character to the coarse and open texture of the soil. At the opposite extreme we find clays so heavy that their cultivation is unprofitable; such soils, however, will carry grass and are rarely left unoccupied. For example, in the southeast of England there are a few commons, i.e., land which has never been regarded as worth enclosing and bringing into particular ownership, situated on heavy clay land; most of such land is pasture, often of the poorest, or, if at any elevation, has been covered with forest from time immemorial.

One last factor in the soil is of the utmost importance to fertility and that is the presence of lime—of calcium carbonate, to be more accurate—in quantities sufficient to maintain the soil in a neutral condition. Old as is the knowledge that lime is of value to the soil, we are only now beginning to realize, as investigation into the minute organisms of the soil proceeds, how fundamental is the presence of lime to fertility. A survey of the farming of England or western Europe will show that all the naturally rich soils are either definitely calcareous or contain sufficient calcium carbonate to maintain them in a neutral condition even after many centuries of cultivation. Examples are not lacking where the supply of calcium carbonate by human agency has been the factor in bringing and keeping land in cultivation. I have discussed one such case on the Rothamsted estate and several others have come under my notice. The amelioration of non-calcareous soils by treatment with chalk or marl from some adjacent source has been a traditional usage in England and the north of France: Pliny reports it as prevailing in Gaul and Britain in his day, and the farmer of to-day often owes the value of his land to his unknown predecessors who continuously chalked or marled the land. Upon the presence of carbonate of lime depends the type of biological reaction that will go on in the soil, the beneficial bacterial processes that prepare the food for plants only take place in a medium with a neutral reaction. The Rothamsted soils have provided two leading cases. I have shown that the accumulation of fertility in grass-land left to itself and neither grazed nor mown, so that virgin conditions were being re-established, was due to the action of the organism called Azotobacter, which fixes free nitrogen from the atmosphere, and was indirectly determined by the presence of calcium carbonate in the soil, without which the Azotobacter can not function. Examination of typical examples of black soils from all parts of the world, the prairies of North America, the steppes of Russia and the Argentine, New Zealand and Indian soils, showed in all of them the Azotobacter organism