Little Johnny was eating breakfast one morning and got to thinking about things. “Mommy, mommy, why has daddy got so few hairs on his head?” he asked his mother.
“He thinks a lot,” replied his mother, pleased with herself for coming up with a good answer to her husband's baldness.
Or she was until Johnny thought for a second and asked, “So why do you have so much hair?”
Edmund RuffinDied 18 Jun 1865 at age 71 (born 5 Jan 1794).The father of soil chemistry in the U.S., who showed how to restore fertility to depleted soil. Though without formal science education, Ruffin determined that the soil of southeast plantations that had been overused with single-crop production had become more acidic and unable to benefit from fertilizers. The remedy he published (1818) was the spreading of marl to neutralize the acidity. He went further by specifying effective methods of fertilizing, plowing and rotating crops to increase production of grains. He expanded his recommendations in book and journal article form, as well lecturing up to the 1850's. He then became an outspoken secessionist, and took his own life upon the South losing in the U.S. Civil War. |
