would increase as the numbers 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256; and subsistence as 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9."

The elder Mill, (Elements of Political Economy, page 56,) using the term capital as including the means of subsistence, and everything else capable of being exchanged for them, states the doctrine which he held in common with Malthus, in these terms:

"It thus sufficiently appears that there is a tendency in population to increase faster than capital. If this be established, it is of no consequence to the present purpose to inquire about the rapidity of the increase. How slow soever the increase of population, provided that of capital is still slower, wages will be reduced so low, that a portion of the population will regularly die of want. Neither can this dreadful consequence be averted otherwise, than by the use of means to prevent the increase of capital from falling short of that of population."

The passage we have marked with italics, is but the necessary logical result of the free operations of the laws of human nature and physical nature, as the latter are conceived by Malthus. Humanity recoils from it, and naturally looks for a remedy in trammelling the conduct of man. Accordingly, in the succeeding pages of his book, Mr. Mill examines the question, by which course of expedients population and capital can be made to keep pace together, whether by restraining the tendency of population to increase, or by endeavouring "to accelerate beyond its natural pace the increase of capital;" and finally arrives at the conclusion that "human happiness cannot be secured by taking forcible methods to make capital increase as fast as population," and that "the grand practical problem is, to find the means of limiting the number of births."

The ideas of Mr. Malthus have been adopted, not only by Mr. Mill, but by the great body of British Economists, down to the present day, and, crossing the Channel, they have found acceptance and approval with most of the Continental writers. Various theories, it is truc, have been propounded, for the purpose of showing that the gloomy results which necessarily flow from the principles maintained by him, may be avoided, and that counteracting forces restrain the natural increase of our species. None of them, however, have recognized anything like a natural equilibrium between population and subsistence, if the former, for a long period, should expand at the rate which the native instincts of man, in their normal and

healthy development, would occasion. Instead of burdening the reader with extended quotations in support of this statement, we cite the declaration of the London Times, when announcing the startling fact, proved by the census of 1851, then just completed, that the numbers of the people of Ireland had diminished by 1,659,330 souls in the preceding ten years. "For a whole generation," said the Times, "man has been a drug in this country, and population a nuisance." Repeatedly recurring to the same topic, the sentiment so bluntly expressed in this language, was represented by that journal as the prevailing one among the Economists of Great Britain.

This is not the place for us to examine the course of man's proceeding in the cultivation of the earth, which Mr. Malthus elaborated in his "Principles of Political Economy," published in 1815, as explaining why it is that subsistence increases in a less ratio than population. The doctrine in regard to rent, founded upon that theory, and more generally connected with the name of Mr. Ricardo, will naturally come under review in a subsequent chapter. It is sufficient for the present to observe, that Malthus's theory of the relations between population and subsistence is obviously founded upon the false notion, that man's consumption of food is its destruction-that having once served the purpose of supporting animal life, its capacity to contribute to that object is absolutely spent and exhausted. The failure to observe that, in the natural course of things it is returned to the earth, to be again formed into food, and resume its office of supporting animal life, is tantamount to this; and it is only in consequence of that failure, that the food-producing power of the soil can be regarded either as a fixed quantity, or as incapable of increasing in the same proportion as the food-consuming power of those who dwell upon it. It may account in part for the tacit adoption of so erroneous an opinion by an intelligent writer, that the discoveries in organic chemistry, which conclusively disprove it, have been made within the last twenty-five years, and are subsequent, by an equal period, to the publication of Mr. Malthus.

If any such exhaustion as that contemplated by Malthus takes place, in consequence of man's subjecting the earth to cultivation, it is obviously because, instead of pursuing the methods dictated by

Nature, and imitating the operations by which she maintained the fertility of the soil and the interchange of vegetable and animal life, prior to his intervention, he has sought out devices to thwart her laws. But to every law is attached the inevitable penalty of its violation, Death. It executes itself by the destruction of the

offender.

Nature doubtless offers examples of what is called special exhaustion. Different species of plants require very unlike proportions of the several kinds of inorganic food which they derive from the soil. The oak requires much of certain kinds, the pine much of other kinds, and little of those needed by the oak. Accordingly, forests of oak and pine succeed each other alternately, or other alternations occur, depending upon the character of the soil. On the Rhine, between Landau and Kaiser-lautern, oak forests, several centuries old, are seen to be gradually giving way to the beech, while others of oak and beech are yielding to the encroachments of the pine. In our own country we have abundant opportunities of seeing that the second growth of timber differs from that of the original forest to which it succeeds. Nature thus teaches the necessity of a rotation of crops, and the greatest advances in agriculture have been since the lesson has been thoroughly learned.

But Nature nowhere teaches a system which results in continuous and permanent exhaustion, though the Economists of the Malthus school have done so. She offers no examples which should encourage a policy that would make one country the granary and another the workshop of the world. It is not among her plans, that the agriculturists of any nation should be "an exporting interest." If, as we learn from the Agricultural section of the Patent Office Report for 1849, "the farmers of Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Illinois, and Wisconsin export a million tons of breadstuffs and provisions, where they import one ton of the atoms drawn from their virgin soil to form agricultural products," it is to perverse arrangements, for which Nature has no responsibility, and not to any tendency growing out of her laws, that the impoverishment of their territory, and the diminution of its power to sustain human life, is to be ascribed. The same document informs us how it is that Nature compels a restoration of the equilibrium, which disobedience to its

laws disturbs, in assuring us that "nothing is more certain than the fact, that a District or State which exports largely the things which Nature demands to form breadstuffs and provisions, must sooner or later export also, some of its consumers of bread and meat;" while the reward of obedience is "that a State can feed and clothe a population ten times larger at home than abroad." We can see no reason in the nature of things, why the disproportion should be set at so low a figure; for it is impossible to conjecture a limit to the increase of population, if man will but conform to the law which Nature exemplifies in all her processes, by which the soil regains whatever material of nutriment it has lent for the support of vegetable and animal life, and that with large interest, derived from the elements furnished by the atmosphere, and incorporated in the substance of the matter, which, on the extinction of its vitality, returns to the bosom of the earth.

Having thus cursorily stated the general laws which operate in the cycle of animal and vegetable life, independent of human agency, we are prepared to follow the steps by which the soil is prepared for the theatre of human labour, and the successive stages which mark man's progress in obtaining food, and in supplying the other wants, the pressure of which is felt, the moment the primary want of his vegetative nature is satisfied.

Those who desire to study the laws which have been the subject of this chapter, will find abundant information in the works of Liebig, and the treatise of Professor Johnston on Agricultural Chemistry. The lectures of the latter gentleman before the New York State Agricultural Society, together with the Prize Essay of Professor Norton on Agricultural Chemistry, which elucidate the subject sufficiently for general readers, may be found in the volume of its Transactions for 1849, which is widely distributed through the State, and readily accessible. Professor Emmons's work on the Agriculture of New York, forming two volumes of the series of its Natural History, is also generally accessible.

4

CHAPTER II.

THE FORMATION OF SOILS, AND THEIR ADAPTATION TO OCCUPATION AND CULTURE.

THE coral islands of the tropical seas present the most remarkable examples of the rapid clothing of a naked rock with vegetable life, and its preparation for the habitation of human beings. The creatures which build up these islands from unknown depths in the ocean, partake, as is indicated by the name of their species, zoophyte, or animal plant, in the characteristics of both orders of vitality. They fulfil their functions without a heart or system of circulation the several polypi in a group have separate mouths and tentacles, and separate stomachs; but beyond this there is no individual property— and form a living sheet of animals, fed and nourished by numerous mouths and stomachs, but coalescing by intervening tissues. They possess no more power of motion than is sufficient to thrust out their arms to seize the food that drifts past them, and they propagate by buds, the bud commencing as a slight prominence on the side of the parent: the bud enlarges, a circle of tentacles grows out, with a mouth in the centre, and the enlargement goes on till the young equals the parent in size, when it begins to protrude buds itselfand the group thus continues to grow. They secrete the coral as the quadruped secretes its bones, until single reefs are formed and attain the surface of the water. But it is essential to the life of these submarine builders that they should be covered by the waves, and when they have reached low water mark they die. A new process now begins, in the accumulation of loose materials upon its summit, from coral boulder-broken off from the reef by the waves, thrown up from below, and gradually ground into fragments-coral gravel and sand. Agassiz states that all that portion of Florida known as the Everglades is only a vast coral bank, composed of a series of more or less parallel reefs, which have successively grown from the bottom of the sea up to the surface, and have been added to the main land, by the gradual filling of the intervals which sepa