Excerpt from Soils, How to Handle and Improve Them Many of the early books on farming were written in a technical style. They smacked of the lecture room and the library rather than of the soil. They were scholarly rather than practical. A spirit of directness and simplicity is beginning to dominate agricultural literature. The modern type of farm books is born of actual contact with the soil and a desire to be of service to the men who are getting a living from the soil. They are democratic; they discuss common things in a plain way. The long and tedious tables of figures in the old books are giving place to crisp summaries. The technical lecture-room phrases are replaced by words in common use on farms. The idea is not to present less science - for nothing is so practical as sound science - but to present science in a simple and practical way. This new spirit is contemporaneous with the farmers' institute, the farmer's reading-course, Nature-study, elementary agriculture in the public schools and other efforts to serve the man who tills the soil. It is an expression of a general movement which aims to democracise agricultural teaching. This book is an attempt to set forth the important facts about the soil in a plain and untechnical manner. It is not a contribution to agricultural science, but an interpretation of it - a new presentation of what is already known. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.