vegetative resources. Landon Carter’s generation had herded and espe-
cially penned cattle, demonstrating a managerial modernism that boded
ill for persistence of the open range. Now Taylor’s more formal usage of
‘‘inclosing’’ doubtlessly inspired the precocious attack upon Virginia’s old
field-fencing laws led by Edmund Ruffin during the s. In the mean-
time, though, Taylor declared green manuring a success, and Edmund Ruf-
fin, then not quite twenty years old, newly married and newly a farmer, read
Aratorand tried Taylor’s principles on his own weary James River planta-
tion. Other tidewater readers must have, as well.
Much later, when Ruffin himself was a full-time editor and writer in
Petersburg, he published a fine seventh edition ofAratorin his agricultural
journal,Farmers’ Register( December )—this despite Ruffin’s own
failure with the doctrine of green manure more than two decades earlier.
The young Edmund had even put his estate, Coggins Point, up for sale,
hoping to emigrate. Finding no buyers, he persisted in reading, pastArator
and older British agronomic works, but he found these mostly inapplicable
to South Atlantic conditions. At last he came upon the first important mod-
ern organic chemistry, Sir Humphry Davy’sElements of Agricultural Chem-
istry, in a Course of Lectures for the Board of Agriculture(published in Lon-
don in , then in Fredericksburg, Virginia, in ). Taylor’s chemistry
was primitive and wrong, like that of the pre-Davy British agronomies. It
was Davy’s fourth ‘‘lecture’’ that electrified young Ruffin. In Lincolnshire,
the professor had observed soil of apparent excellent texture and color, yet
‘‘steril.’’ Davy’s test revealed that the sample contained ‘‘salt of iron,’’ an
acidic matter that could be reversed simply by ‘‘application of quicklime.’’
Ruffin contrived equipment and materials to test his own soils—there were
no commercial suppliers or experts within his reach then. At first he failed.
His soils were not salty. Despairing but briefly, Ruffin then experienced
a sort of epiphany, which he described much later in his autobiography:
‘‘Though not a salt of which one of the component parts was an acid, might
not the poisonous quality be apureoruncombined acid?’’ Ruffin had dis-
covered the problem of acidity, actually quite common to tidewater soils,
whether long farmed or not. The problem’s cure was lime, or some other
form of calcium carbonate. This was located on his own property. One of
Ruffin’s elderly slaves took him to an old, overgrown excavation, a relic of
a discontinued experiment by an ancestor. What young Edmund saw was
deposits of marl lying just below the ground’s surface. Marl is fossilized
shells left from advancing ancient coastlines; the shells are often so des-
iccated by time and the earth’s upheavals and subsidences that they are