., in the water as
the wheat-plant requires. I do not know that I make myself understood.

"You want to show," said the Deacon, "that the wheat-plant requires
richer food than clover."

Yes, I want to show that, though clover requires _more_ food per day
than wheat, yet the clover can drink such a large amount of water, that
it is not necessary to make the "sap of the soil" so rich in nitrogen,
phosphoric acid, and potash, for clover, as it is for wheat. I think
this tells the whole story.

Clover is, or may be, the grandest renovating and enriching crop
commonly grown on our farms. It owes its great value, not to any power
it may or may not possess of getting nitrogen from the atmosphere, or
phosphoric acid and potash from the subsoil, but principally, if not
entirely, to the fact that the roots can drink up such a large amount of
water, and live and thrive on very weak food.

HOW TO MAKE A FARM RICH BY GROWING CLOVER.

Not by growing the clover, and selling it. Nothing would exhaust the
land so rapidly as such a practice. We must either plow under the
clover, let it rot on the surface, or pasture it, or use it for soiling,
or make it into hay, feed it out to stock, and return the manure to the
land. If clover got its nitrogen from the atmosphere, we might sell the
clover, and depend on the roots left in the ground, to enrich the soil
for the next crop. But if, as I have endeavored to show, clover gets its
nitrogen from a weak solution in the soil, it is clear, that though for
a year or two we might raise good crops from the plant-food left in the
clover-roots, yet we should soon find that growing a crop of clover, and
leaving only the roots in the soil, is no way to permanently enrich
land.

I do not say that such a practice will "exhaust" the land. Fortunately,
while it is an easy matter to impoverish land, we should have to call in
the aid of the most advanced agricultural science, before we could
"exhaust" land of its plant-food. The free use of Nitrate of Soda, or
Sulphate of Ammonia, might enable us to do something in the way of
exhausting our farms, but it would reduce our balance at a bank, or send
us to the poor-house, before we had fully robbed the land of its
plant-food.

To exhaust land, by growing and selling clover, is an agricultural
impossibility, for the simple reason that, long before the soil is
exhausted, the clover would produce such a poverty-stricken crop, that
we should give up the at