try, except in the principal blue grass counties, is very much broken, and nearly every member of the Lower Silurian formation is exposed at one or more places in the district. This gives within limits a considerable variation in the composition of the soil, but all of it is made fertile by the presence of the carbonate and pho phate of lime. The principal tree growth on the best tobacco soils is hickory, white oak, tulip tree, beech, walnut, hackberry, black locust and ash. All this growth indicates a very fruitful soil. Where the white oak is the prevailing growth the soil is called "oak soil." The soils in every part of the district are exceedingly durable, and where apparently exhausted, if they are abandoned for a few years, fresh plant food will be supplied by the disintegration of the shaly beds and the soft limestones that underlie them. Many of these limestones contain such a large percentage of phosphoric acid as even to make them, when pulverized, valuable as a fertilizer. The great unevenness of the surface of the country makes tillage difficult. The slopes of the hills, except when kept in grass, soon become scarified with unsightly gullies. Clean culture, such as bacco requires, soon makes the land unproductive, not, as many suppose, by the amount of fertilizing material extracted from the soil by that crop, but because of the rapidity and ease with which the soil is carried from the hillsides to the valleys. However, the region is fortunate in having a subsoil and rocky strata beneath, which hold in store at large amount of unexpended plant food, which is unavailable until it has been liberated by the crumbling of these underclays and rocky beds through the effects of weathering. Unlike almost any other region nou alluvial, the fertility of the soil is renewed by time, as interest gathers upon a fixed capital. While a few planters prefer the old lands, ard especially the old sod lands in the bluegrass districts because the yield is much larger, the greater number of growers prefer the freshly opened lands, where white oak was the original tree growth. The southern and eastern sides of the elevations are usually selected for growing tobacco. In such situations the plant grows into its greatest beauty and most useful qualities, and ripens more evenly and more quickly. Where the soil is derived from the highly calcareous, sandy, blue lime FIG. 99. WHITE BURLEY ON SCAFFOLD. stones and has been kept in bluegrass sod for many years, an excellent manufacturing leaf is grown, not so silky, or so bright in color, or so soft to the touch, or so lustrous, or elastic, or high priced, as that grown on the fresh oak lands, but heavier in body and richer in gummy matter. This old-land product is preferred for manufacturing plug and navy, but not for making cutting tobacco, as the amount of gum present unfits it for that purpose. The old-land product is considered, therefore, a most useful quality of tobacco, and though its color is more red than yellow, it has supplied a want for plug for which the thin, highly colored tobacco grown on fresh soil is not at all suited. It is an ideal filler for plug tobacco, having a large absorptive capacity, mild in its effects upon the nervous system, delicate in its flavor, and withal is very popular with consumers. The soil is the most potent factor in the growth of the White Burley, as it is in the growth of the yellow tobacco, or the heavy-shipping leaf. Take the soils of one of the typical counties, Owen for instance, and they are classified by the planters according to their timber growth. Plot 1 has a growth of sugar tree, beech, tulip tree, hackberry and butternut, and is first-class bluegrass land; this soil makes the largest number of pounds per acre, but the product is red, heavy and gummy. Plot 2 has a growth of white oak and more clay and less sand in its composition; the tobacco grown on it is thin, bright and silky. Plot 3 resembles an alluvial soil, filled with organic matter; the timber growth is ash, locust, poplar and oak; it grows a rough, heavy tobacco useful, as a general thing, only for fillers and for wrappers in the manufacture of the cheaper grades of plug tobacco. The White Burley soil in Ohio consists of modified glacial drift, and occupies, beside the Ohio river basin, the fringing spurs, which rise to a hight of 400 to 500 feet above the Ohio river and run back from the basin, uniting at a greater or less distance in a plateau country deeply gashed at intervals by the tributaries of the Ohio and Miami rivers. Many broad areas of level land occur on this plateau, so flat, indeed, that in times of excessive rains, they overflow and form temporary lakes. The drift, or glacial deposits, contributes mainly to the formation of the soils of the district, though there are some small areas where the limestones of the Lower Silurian age come to the surface and yield their characteristic soil. The drift is composed largely of fertile clays, in which limestone gravel is imbedded. Four kinds, or varieties, of soil are found in this district: 1. The native soil formed from the limestones, or bed rocks, of the country. 2. Drift soil of the uplands. 3. Black soil of swampy or peaty areas. 4. The alluvial soil of the river and creek bottoms. The native soil is found on the sloping hills that run down to the stream beds. This soil is dark, friable and fertile and very much resembles the bluegrass soil of Kentucky, and it has the same tree growth. It is preferred for tobacco, though it washes easily. Tobacco is grown on all the other classes of soil mentioned, but the peaty and alluvial soils make a coarse, rough article. Summarizing the quality of the product as affected by the variety of soils and different exposures in the White Burley districts of Ohio and Kentucky, we find that: 1. Tobacco grown upon new lands, and especially new oak lands, is thin, light, bright golden in color, gumless and rattles, when handled, like dry fodder. This is the very best cutting leaf. 2. On the same land the second year the product will be heavier, a cherry red in color, with more body, but with little gum. This is suitable both for cutters and for the manufacture of plug. 3. Old sod land makes a product of better body, ε good absorbent, less light in color, more useful as a plug filler, with a considerable gain in the number of pounds produced on a given area. 4. Alluvial soils produce tobacco dark in color, rough in feel, bony and lacking in softness, and it has a small absorptive capacity. As to exposures, other things being equal, the east |