Chapter 31

THEORIES VERSUS FACTS

PERCY planned to walk to Blue Mound to take the three-thirty train that Saturday afternoon; but Adelaide's parents both insisted that she would willingly drive to the station, and the grandmother discovered that she needed a certain kind of thread which Adelaide could then also get at the store.

"Certainly," said Adelaide, with some merriment, "I always enjoy our departing guests to the train."

"Very well," replied Percy. "If you must go to get the thread and will permit me to be the coachman, I shall be satisfied, for you will be home early."

"Then we will take the colts and buckboard, and I shall be home in less than twenty minutes after your train leaves the station."

"I think I have missed several days of your beautiful 'Indian Summer,' because of my trip to the North," Percy remarked to Mr. West as they sat on the broad veranda waiting for the hour of two thirty when the colts were to be ready for the drive.

"I wish you might have been with us while Professor Barstow was here," replied Mr. West, "not only because of the mild autumn weather we have had, but also because Professor Barstow has some ideas about questions of soil fertility that are very different from those you hold. He says a young man from Washington gave a lecture at his college down in North Carolina, in which he informed them that the cause of infertility of soils is a poisonous substance excreted by the plant itself, and that this can be overcome by changing from one crop to another because the excrete of one plant, while poisonous to that plant, will not be poisonous to other plants of a different kind. Thus, by rotation of crops, good crops could be grown indefinitely on the same land without the addition of plant food. He said that the soil water alone dissolved plenty of plant food from all soils for the production of good crops, and that the supply of plant food will be permanently maintained, because the plant food contained in the subsoil far below where the roots go is being brought to the surface by the rise of the capillary moisture, and that there is in fact a steady tendency toward an accumulation of plant food in the surface soil. He said that it is never necessary to apply fertilizing material to any soil for the purpose of increasing the supply of plant food in that soil. He admitted that applications of fertilizers sometimes produce increased crop yields, but that the effect was due to the power of the fertilizer to destroy the toxic substances excreted by the plants, and this is really the principal effect of potash, phosphates, and nitrates, and also of farm manure and green manures. Humus, he said, is one of the very best substances for destroying these toxic excrete although they had some other things which were as good or better than any sore of fertilizing materials. He mentioned especially a substance called pyrogallol, which cost $2.00 a pound, and of course it could not be applied on a large scale; but it was as good a fertilizer as anything, although it contains nothing but carbon, oxygen, and hydrogen, which, as you explained to me when you were here before, the plants secure in abundance from air and water. This information had been secured in the laboratories at Washington by growing wheat seedlings in water culture for twenty-day periods."

"I have already heard something of those theories," said Percy, "but I shall be glad to have you tell me more about them. As I understand them, we need only to rotate and cultivate and our lands should always continue to produce bountiful crops. Is that correct?"

"I understand that is the theory," replied Mr. West, "but I know it is not correct for my grandfather used to grow two or three times as much wheat per acre as I can grow, and I rotate much more than he