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Southland Times, Issue 1614, 2 August 1872, Page 3

In a recent letter to tLe New York Fanners' Club, Professor S. "W. Johnson, of Yale dollepe, says : — " The labors of chemists to discover positively all the causes of the fertility of soils have not yet met with conclusive success. The mechanical structure of soil is of a primary importance. Naked rock grows lichen ; the same rock crushed into coarse grains grows a much higher order of vegetable ; pulverised fine, the cereals grow in it. G-eoloizy, chemistry, botany, | dynamics, heat, light, and electricity, are all intimately combined in the grand process of vegetation. There are sandy soils in our Eastern States which, without manure, yield meagre crops of rye and buckwheat ; but there are sandy soils in Ohio which, without manure, yield on an average eighty bushels of Indian corn an acre, and have yielded it for twenty to fifty years in unbroken succession, the ingredients of these soils being, by chemical analysis, the same. At present no difference is known bstween them, except the coarseness of the particles — the first being coarse, while tue Ohio sand ia an exceedingly fine powder. The power of soils to attract and imbibe moisture and oxygen was well shown by Sehubler, of Hoffen, forty years ago. Of thirteen different soils, quartz sand absorbed in thirty days 1.1000 parts of oxygen, and no moisture, while humus absorbed 13 of oxygen and 120 of moisture." Advertisements received too late for Classification.