which has reduced
so many regions to poverty. We may fairly look forward to the time,
not long distant, when the old progressive degradation in the
fertility of the soil coating will no longer occur. It is otherwise
with the mass of the soil, that body of commingled decayed rock and
vegetable matter which must possess a certain thickness in order to
serve its needs. As yet no considerable arrest has been made in the
processes which lead to the destruction of this earthy mass. In all
countries where tillage is general the rivers are flowing charged with
all they can bear away of soil material. Thus in the valley of the Po,
a region where, if the soil were forest-clad, the down-wearing of the
surface would probably be at no greater rate than one foot in five
thousand years, the river bears away the soil detritus so rapidly that
at the present time the downgoing is at the rate of one foot in eight
hundred years, and each decade sees the soil disappear from hillsides
which were once fertile, but are now reduced to bare rocks. All about
the Mediterranean the traveller notes extensive regions which were
once covered with luxuriant forests, and were afterward the seats of
prosperous agriculture, where the soil has utterly disappeared,
leaving only the bare rocks, which could not recover its natural
covering in thousands of years of the enforced fallow.

Within the limits of the United States the degradation of the soil,
owing to the peculiar conditions of the country, is in many districts
going forward with startling rapidity. It has been the habit of our
people--a habit favoured by the wide extent of fertile and easily
acquired frontier ground--recklessly to till their farms until the
fields were exhausted, and then to abandon them for new ground. By
shallow ploughing on steep hillsides, by neglect in the beginning of
those gulches which form in such places, it is easy in the hill
country of the eastern United States to have the soil washed away
within twenty years after the protecting forests have been destroyed.
The writer has estimated that in the States south of the Ohio and
James Rivers more than eight thousand square miles of originally
fertile ground have by neglect been brought into a condition where it
will no longer bear crops of any kind, and over fifteen hundred miles
of the area have been so worn down to the subsoil or the bed rock that
it may never be profitable to win it again to agricultural uses.

Hitherto,