subsoil sixty-one pounds of phosphorus per acre, counting two million pounds of soil in each case.  He said, if we didn’t like that we might go into the Great Central Basin of Tennessee or the famous Blue Grass Region of Kentucky and find land that is still extremely productive and more valuable than ever, even after a hundred years of cultivation, and buy land containing from three thousand to fifteen thousand pounds of phosphorus per acre.”

“I know both of those sections very well,” said Mr. West.  “But doesn’t it seem strange that the scientists at Washington would teach as they do?  Why doesn’t the plant food accumulate in the surface soil of those barrens?  Surely they have been lying there long enough, with no crops whatever removed, so that they ought to have become very rich.  I wish I had known about their phosphorus content so I could have told Professor Barstow.  He was quite carried away with the Washington theory.”

“You ought not for a moment call it the ‘Washington’ theory,” said Percy; “and neither is it promulgated by scientists, but rather by two or three theorists who are upheld by our greatest living optimist.  Science, Sir, is a word to be spoken of always with the greatest respect.  Of course you know its meaning?”

“Yes, I know it comes from the Latin scire, to know.”

“Then science means knowledge; it does not mean theory or hypothesis, but absolute and positive knowledge.  Is there any uncertainty as to the instant when the next eclipse will appear?  No, none whatever.  Science means knowledge, and men are scientists only so far as they have absolute knowledge, and to that extent every farmer is a scientist.

“Nevertheless the erroneous teaching so widely promulgated by the federal Bureau of Soils is undoubtedly a most potent influence against the adoption of systems of positive soil improvement in the United States, because it is disseminated from the position of highest authority.  Other peoples have ruined other lands, but in no other country has the powerful factor of government influence ever been used to encourage the farmers to ruin their lands.”

CHAPTER XXXII

GUESSING AND GASSING

AS we were riding to Montplain yesterday,” said Adelaide to Percy, soon after they started for Blue Mound, “Professor Barstow told me that in his opinion all that was needed to redeem these old lands of Virginia and the Carolinas is plenty of efficient labor, such as he thinks we had before the war.  I know papa does not agree with him in that, but Professor said that soils do not wear out if well cultivated, that in New England they grow as large crops as ever, and that in Europe, on the oldest lands the crop yields are very much larger than in the United States; and in fact that the European countries are producing about twice as large crops as they did a hundred years ago.  He thinks it is because they do their work more thoroughly than we do.  He says that ‘a little farm well tilled’ is the key to the solution of our difficulties.”