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McCORMICK MESSENGER. McCQRMICK. S. C.. THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 28, 1939 Smart Designs for ten Who Sew •-v l^lAGRAM design for a house A-' dress that's just about as comfortable as a house dress can be—with unbelted waistline, deep armholes, plain neckline, anfl an absolute absence of folderols. The princess lines make it beautifully slim. As you see from the dia gram, you can finish this easy pat tern (1798) in just a few hours. For the Great Outdoors. Gay and winning as the lilt of the “Skater’s Waltz” is this sports suit for juniors, with its snug, bell hop jacket and extravagantly swirling skirt. It includes a be witching little hood, too. If you’re young and lively and love the great outdoors, then you’ll want 1673, even if you never wear a skate—whether roller or ice! The Patterns. No. 1798 is designed for sizes 14, 16, 18, 20, 40, 42 and 44. Size. 16 re quires 4% yards of 35-inch mate rial without nap; 2 yards of braid. No. 1673 is designed for sizes 11, 13, 15 and 17. Size 13 requires IYa yards of 54-inch material for long- sleeved jacket and 1% yards of 39- inch material to line; Ys yard of 54-inch material for hood and Yi yard of 39-inch material to line; 2 1 £ yards of 54-inch material for skirt. Send your order to The Sewing Circle Pattern Dept., Room 1324, 211 W. Wacker Dr., Chicago, 111. Price of patterns, 15 cents (iq coins) each. (Bell Syndicate—WNU Service.! ^ Powerful Song Few songs have ever affected (heir listeners as much as “Amour sacre de la patrie” as it was sung during the presentation of the op era “La Muette de Portici” at the Theater Royal de la Monnaie in Brussels on the night of August 25, 1830. Inspired by it, the audi ence stopped the performance, broke the chairs, rushed into the street and started the famous rev olution through which Belgium won its administrative freedom from Holland.—Collier’s. CHILLS AND FEVER Here's Relief From 7 Malaria! ^ Don’t let Malaria torture youP Don’t shiver with chills and bum with fever. At first sign of Malaria, take Grove’s Tasteless Chill Tonic. A real Malaria medicine. Made espe cially for the purpose. Contains tasteless quinidine and iron. Grove's Tasteless Chill Tonic ac tually combats Malaria infection in the blood. It relieves the freezing chills, the burning fever. Helps you feel better fast.' Thousands take Grove’s Tasteless Chill Tonic for Malaria and swear by it. Pleasant to take, too. Even children take it without a whimper. Don’t shiver and bum. At Ma laria’s first sign take Grove’s Taste less Chill Tonic. At all drugstores. Buy the large size as it gives you much more for your money. Treasure Trove That is a good book which is opened with expectation and <*losed with profit.—Alcott. ( NOW! CHAFE-IRRITATION JKIN TROUBLE | SEW HEAL MEDICATED ?ROTECTION.SOOT«ES] C00L5. EVEN PRICKir HEAT HASHES. / MEXICAN Els POWDER Edmund Ruffin, Known as Man Who Fired First Shot at Fort Sumter, Should Be Famous as "Father of Soil Chemistry" George Washington overseeing farming operations at Mount Vernon. By ELMO SCOTT WATSON * (Released by Western Newspaper Union.! .'i.' A KEEN-EYED young man worked in an improvised lab oratory over samples of soil he had taken from hiis up land farm. As he tested the reactions from the chemi cals he applied to the earth, he jotted down notes in a little book and a look of satisfaction lighted his thin face. The time was the spring of ^ WNU—7 39—39 SPECIAL BARGAINS TATHEN you see the specials of VV our merchants announced in the columns of this paper you can depend on them. They mean bargains for you. •They are offered by merchants who are not afraid to announce their prices or the quality of the merchandise they offer. 1818. The place was Cog- gin’s Point in the tidewater area of Virginia. The young man was Edmund Ruffin, America’s first scientific farmer, who was to be known to later generations as the “father of soil chemistry in the United States.” First man in this country to make a chemical test of the soil and to point the way toward mod em soil science, Edmund Ruffin was also to be known to history as the man who fired the first gun ht Fort Sumter in 1861 and precipitated the Civil war. More than a century after his revolutionary experiments, the contributions of Edmund Ruffin to present da^ soil knowledge and conservation were recalled by Prof. Emil Truog, professor of soil in the University of Wis consin in his presidential address recently before the American So ciety of Agronomy. “Edmund Ruffin, born in 1794,” said Professor Truog, “was in youth, frail of health and rest less of spirit. He read much of whatever came to hand and grew up in almost complete ignorance of the practical agricultural tasks facing him.” A student at William and Mary college at the age of 16, a bride groom a year or two later, and a private in the War of 1812, Ruffin assumed control of the Coggin’s Point plantation in 1813. His father had died three years before. Worn-Out Land. A dreary prospect faced the young planter. The Ruffin land, like that of neighboring farmers, was poor, worn out by two cen turies of bad agricultural meth ods. Tobacco was king in that pioneer farm economy, imposing a single crop type of agriculture in which, says Avery Craven’s book, “Edmund Ruffin, Southern er,” the sole object was imme diate great yields regardless of future consequences. Such a system under frontier scarcity of capital and labor threw the bur- l dens of abnormal production squarely upon the land in a re gion where soil formation was poor, rainfall heavy and concen trated and harmful micro-organ isms unusually active. American farmers had reaped a profitable living from furnish ing food to Europe torn by the Napoleonic wars of the previous decade. But this lucrative mar ket was closed by the Treaty of Ghent. Worn out farms were be ing abandoned by the thousands. The tide of settlement was turn ing west to virgin areas where land was cheap. Although crop rotation was fol lowed by a few of Ruffin’s neigh bors, such practices met with dif ficulties, for clover and legumes failed to grow on poor lands and this cut the supply of live stock and manure. The com crop on Ruffin’s farm averaged only 10 bushels to the acre. Wheat yield ed no better than six. For the next five years young Ruffin experimented, seeking a solution to his problem. He drained his swamp land and had good crops for three years. Then production so dwindled that he quit planting this acreage. He tried manure and got practically no beneficial results. He could not make clover grow. His crude plow made shallow furrows on the hilly land which became watercourses washing away the soil in rainy weather. Disillusioned, but still eager to find a way out of his troubles, Ruffin came on a copy of Sir Humphrey Davy’s book, “Agricul tural Chemistry.” He studied it closely and although he had no knowledge of chemistry, he soon grasped the fundamentals. His attention was drawn particularly to Davy’s statement that a sterile soil “containing the salt of iron, or any acid matter may be amel iorated by the application of quick-lime.” The young planter found direc tions in Davy’s book for testing soils for soluble iron, calcium and lime-bearing earth and also for testing limestone and marl for their carbonate content. The Tests Begin. He set to work immediately, gathered the necessary equip ment and chemicals and began his tests. While he was not able to reveal the presence of free acids in his soil, he was able to prove the absence of lime. Then observing that sorrel and pine EDMUND RUFFIN were abundant on the poor soil, he came to the conclusion that “vegetable acids” were the cause of sterility in his land. “Ruffin was probably the first man in the whole world,” said Professor Truog, “to conclude that upland mineral soils are often acid due to the * presence of free acids, made possibly by the absence of calcareous (lime bearing) earths. He also held that all fertile soils are either calcareous or hold lime in com bination with acids in such form that it is easily extracted with hydrochloric acid.” With the aid of the test for carbonates, Ruffin located depos its of marl on his farm and at other places in the neighborhood. He decided to put his theory to a practical test by supplying lime to his sterile soil. Ruffin’s epochal experiment in putting soil science to work for the first time attracted practical ly no attention in the neighbor hood at the time. Yet it was to revolutionize the agriculture of his home state for the next gen eration and exert a profound in fluence on soil conservation as it is practiced today. “On a February morning in 1818,” says Craven, whom Pro fessor Truog quotes extensively in his address, “Ruffin’s carts be gan to haul marl that puzzled Negro hands, dug from pits hastily opened on his lower lands. They spread 200 bushels over a few acres of newly cleared, but poor ridge land and in the spring Ruffin planted this entire field to corn as a testing crop. “Eagerly he waited. As the season advanced he found reason for joy. From the very start, the plants on marled ground showed marked superiority and at harvest time, they yielded an advantage of fully 40 per cent. The carts went back to the pits. Fields took on fresh life. A new era in the agricultural history of the region dawned. ‘.Tn October of that year, he presented to the agricultural so ciety of his own county the first of what was to be a long line of valuable papers offered to the cause of agriculture. Stating his theories as to the ‘nature of soils and the action of calcareous manures,’ on them, he adduced the slender sum of his experi ences to support what was in fact a revolutionary approach to the \£hole problem that vexed the farmers of the New World.” An Important Book. Ruffin made further tests and expanded his knowledge, adding new facts and proofs to support his theory. In 1821 his paper, now enlarged and revised, was published in the American Farm er, a new agricultural journal published in Baltimore. Eleven years later, grown into a book of 242 pages, it was published under the title, “An Essay on Calcareous Manures.” It ran through five editions and was described in the Year Book of the department of agriculture at the end of the Nineteenth century as “the most thorough piece of work on a special agricultural subject ever published in the English lan guage.” (The book by Sir Hum phrey Davy which so influenced Ruffin had not yet been published at the time of his death in 1799.) President John Tyler, himself a Virginia planter, declared that Ruffin’s essay “in its valuable consequences would be worth more to the country than all the state papers that have been the most celebrated of our time.” An example of what Ruffin ac complished a century ago by the practical application of his soil tests and by preaching the philos ophy of soil improvement may be found in the fact that from 1838 to 1850 the land values of tide water Virginia increased by over $17,000,000. One estimate, ac cording to Avery Craven, placed the total increase from the ap plication of marl after 1820 at over $30,000,000. Ruffin had a number of noted predecessors in the study of soil management. Leading among these was George Washington, says Professor Truog, who was thoroughly familiar with the agri cultural writings of the foremost English authorities of his time. Yet the Father of His Country, was unable to increase produc tion materially or even maintain the level of soil fertility at Mount Vernon. “Washington practiced soil ero sion control to a certain extent,” Professor Truog points out, “took pains to conserve animal ma nure, went to great labor in fer tilizing with mud obtained from creeks and marshes and spent much money in the purchase of special seeds. Political and economic ques tions occupied most of Ruffin’s time in the last 20 years of his life. He was an uncompromising advocate of slavery and became an ardent secessionist. He fired the first shot at Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861, and took an active part in several battles of the Civil war. “After Lee’s surrender,” says Professor Truog, “Ruffin, at the age of 71, feeling that now he was a man without a country and too old and weary to be other than a burden of his children, with stern logic caused a shot to ring out that he might join his comrades who died in battle for a lost cause.” Although a century has passed since Ruffin’s achievement and 50 years have elapsed since Wheeler’s demonstrations, we are still today applying only a fraction of lime to soil we should. Professor Truog points out. “Moreover, today we have tests of considerable refinement for determining the lime needs of soils; lime or marl has been lo cated in nearly every section of the country; highly efficient ma chinery has been developed for grinding limestone and digging marl; facilities for transporting the lime to the farm where need ed have been developed beyond the fondest hopes of 25 years ago; we have data almost with out end showing that the use of lime is fundamental in the humid regions to the growth of legumes, to nitrogen fixation, to a favor able availability of soil phos phates, and finally to soil con- servatidn itself. “We ride about the country and pass through sections where the eye meets out crops of limestone in every direction, but alas due principally to an acid condition of the soil, there are no fields of alfalfa, sweet clover or other high-grade legumes which are so necessary for the creation of a land of ‘milk and honey.’ ” Edmund Ruffin, he says, had the answer to farmers and even agronomists who sometimes say that liming is too expensive: “We never calculate the cost of any old practice,” Ruffin once wrote. “We are content to clear woodland that afterwards will not pay for the expense of tillage. —But let any new practice be proposed and then everyone be- PROF. EMIL TRUOG gins to count the cost—and on such erroneous premises that if applied to every kind of farm labor, the estimate would prove that the most fertile land known could scarcely defray the ex pense of its cultivation.” Pointing out that agronomists in particular, in addition to pro moting the use of lime, should encourage also the use of fertiliz ers generally, the furthering of soil conservation and the adop tion of proper land use programs. Professor Truog said: “Soil and lime testing, crude as it may have been, was what made possible Ruffin’s monu mental world in the field of soil acidity, liming and soil manage ment. And if soil testing was practicable in Ruffin’s day, it should be even more practicable today when so much more is known relative to the many fac tors involved. “After 25 years of continuous ex perience with soil tests, I am con vinced that with further study and improvement, they will in time be generally used by all agronomists in diagnosing the lime and fertilizer needs of soils devoted to agriculture. I envis age a time in the near future when conditions and the supply of plant nutrients devoted to in tensive culture will be controlled by means of tests much like sim ilar matters are controlled in a chemical factory. Then and only then, can we say that we are putting cheijiical soil science fully to work in a practical way. “Some agronomists become greatly disturbed when fertilizer applied on the basis of soil tests does not give sufficient crop in crease the first year to pay for the fertilizer. They seem to for get the all-important long-time benefit, namely that of mainte nance of soil fertility which is the backbone of soil conserva tion, for fertile soils soon pro duce a protective cover of vege tation which for the most part is the best preventive of soil ero sion. “Can farmers be sold on the philosophy of returning as much to the soil as is removed? This philosophy is so simple and so sound that farmers can be in duced to accept it more easily than some of the make-shift or stop-gap philosophies. “Will the cycle of soil depletion and agricultural desolation be re peated over and over, indefinite ly? If the answer is to be no, then it will be necessary for the agronomist not only to take soil science from the sequestered cloister of the laboratory and hitch it to the plow, but also to go forth preaching a positive and realistic program of soil manage ment and conservation as Ed- j-nund Ruffin did over 100 years ago. Simple Patches for This Applique Quilt Pattern 6416 A leaf, a flower, a center patch ~that’s all there is to Mayflower applique. Start your blocks now— the patches are easy to apply! You can use the same material throughout for the flower patches or do each one in a different scrap. Use this easy and effec tive block for pillow or scarf as well. Pattern 6416 contains the Block Chart; carefully drawn pat tern pieces; color schemes; direc tions for making the quilt; yard age chart; illustration of quilt. To obtain this pattern send 15 cents in coins to The Sewing Cir cle Household Arts Dept., 259 W. 14th St., New York. Please write your name, ad dress and pattern number plainly. Pull the Trigger on. Lazy Bowels, and Also Pepsin-ize Stomach! When constipation brings on acid indi gestion, bloating, dizzy spells, gas, coated tongue, sour taste, and bad breath, your stomach is probably loaded up with cer tain undigested food and your bowels don’t move. So you need both Pepsin to help break up fast that rich undigested food in your stomach, and Laxative Senna to pull the trigger on those lazy bowels. So be sure your laxative also contains Pepsin. Take Dr. Caldwell’s Laxative, because its Syrup Pepsin helps you rain that won derful stomach-relief, while the Laxative Senna moves your bowels. Tests prove the power of Pepsin to dissolve those lumps of undigested protein food which may linger in your stomach, to cause belching, gastric acidity and nausea. This is how pepsin- izing your stomach helps relieve it of such distress. At the same time this medicine wakes up lazy nerves and muscles in your bowels to relieve your constipation. So see how much better you feel by taking the laxative that also puts Pepsin to work on that stomach discomfort, too. Even fin icky children love to taste this pleasant family laxative. Buy Dr. Caldwell’s Lax ative-Senna with Syrup Pepsin at your druggist today! Pleasure a Reflex Pleasure is the reflex of unim peded energy.—Sir William Ham ilton. Put Just **2 drops" hi each nostril for quick relief from Spring head cold discomforts. PENETROmmS Source of Pleasure A babe in a house is a well- spring of pleasure.—Tupper. strained eyes quickly recover their strength if treated with Leonardi’s Golden Eye Lotion. Blood-shot, inflam mation and soreness are relieved In one day. Cools, heals end strengtb- *“• LEONARD PS GOLDEN EYE LOTION MAKES WEAK EYES STRONG New Large Size with Dropper—30 cent* >• B. Lsonardi 0 Co. lac.. New Rochell*, N. T. There to Stay What’s bred in the bone will never out of the flesh. Grandmother knew r too! Do you realize that as far back as your Grandmother could prob ably remember, Wintersmith’s has been one of the South’s best-known tonics for Malaria and for use as a General Tonic. For over 70 years, millions of people can’t be wrong! TRY a bottle and see for yourself! 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