'I like to play chess with bald men in the park, although it's hard to find 32 of them.'
Emo Phillips (February 7 1956-)
Picture: Matthew Simmons/Getty Images
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. |
