HOW SOILS WERE RUINED BY PROTECTION.
[TO THE EDITOR OF THE "SPECTATOR."]
SIR,—It is quite true that, as Mr. John Higgins says in his letter published in the Spectator of August 22nd, "the old stored riches" which once existed in old pasture lands are gone, and it was once equally true that, as be points out, "the top slice of turf (humus) accumulates so slowly that the adage, To break a pasture makes a man; to make a pasture breaks a man,' " has been but too painfully proved in these islands. But the latter part of the adage is certainly not true now, seeing that with the aid of a mixture of deeply rooted plants and grasses we can now manufacture a fine turf, and a much more deeply rooted one, than ever existed in England ; and all the time, so far from breaking a man, the farmer can, in the process of forming the turf, make the land pay better than it ever did before. The practical proofs of this are to be seen on my Clifton-on-Boromont farm (one mile from Yetholm and eight miles from Kelso); and that we can now in a com- paratively short time restore the soil to its original virgin condition, and even improve on that, is shown by the old and new turf analyses made by Dr. Volcker, and given in an appendix in my "Agricultural Changes and Laying Down Land to Grass." An eminent economist lately observed to me that there is more in the system by which the fertility of the land can thus be restored than in any Protection.—I am,
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