Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 85.djvu/395

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CULTIVATION OF WASTE LAND
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adays too heavy for cultivation; but the problems they present are rather those of engineering than of agricultural science. What I should like in conclusion once more to emphasize is, that the reclamation of heath and peat-land of which I have been speaking—reclamation that in the past could only be imperfectly effected at a great and possibly unremunerative expense of human labor—has now become feasible through the applications of science—the knowledge of the functions of fertilizers, the industrial developments which have given us basic slag and potash salts, the knowledge of the fertility that can be gained by the growth of leguminous plants. From beginning to end the process of reclamation of moor and heath, as we see in progress in northwestern Europe, is stamped as the product of science and investigation.