Excerpt from The Principles of Soil Management In 1895 the preface was written for the Rural Science Series. It set forth the purpose of the Series to be the desire to place in readable form the best results of scientific thought and discovery relating to agriculture and country life, in order that the general public might be made aware of the progress, and that farmers might be led more effectively to apply the information in their daily work. It was the hope that the Series, under the present writer's direction or another's, might gradually extend itself to the whole range of agricultural scientific literature. The books now included in The Rural Science Series are about two dozen, making nearly two volumes, on the average, for each year. The number of writers on agricultural topics is increasing, the knowledge on all subjects is rapidly accumulating, and the reading-public is gradually enlarging; there is every reason to expect, therefore, that the Series will extend itself still more rapidly in the years to come. It was considered to be an auspicious circumstance that the Rural Science Series began with a book on the soil, for this grounded the enterprise. 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.