that is neglected to such a degree that we wring our hands in despair. In the domain of manufactures we are highly civilized beings, but in regard to the cultivation of the soil, we are still in a barbarism as dark as midnight. We congratulate ourselves upon our marvelous ingenuity in employing and rendering valuable by means of our manufactures, the refuse and waste formerly considered absolutely worthless. But at the same time, we are allowing at least one half of the refuse from food-products, the contents of the city sewers, to escape us, without being utilized, and be emptied into the rivers, to pollute them. The sea, their final destination, does not return in its fishes and pearls a thousandth part of the value of what we pour into it. This waste of millions of tons of the most valuable waste products is positively atrocious and yet it is comical when we see the anxiety and care with which the tiniest drop of sulphuric acid is saved and utilized in the chemical laboratories, and the tearing haste with which an inventor secures a patent when he has succeeded in perfecting a process by which the refuse from some manufacture can be turned to a profitable account. We boast of having harnessed the powers of nature and yet we allow millions of acres of land to remain barren, although we know theoretically that there is not a single district that must of necessity remain a desert. We know that every kind of soil, even if it consists of iron shoe nails or crushed stones, can be made productive by heat and water, whose application is not beyond human power except—perhaps—at the poles. We point with pride to our coal and copper mines which are tunneled deep into the earth and under the ocean, and yet we are not ashamed of the bare mountain sides above them, from which man, the same being who has burrowed into their depths, is unable to produce anything. We
