ABSTRACT
Dureau de la Malle explains that his starting point is the beneficial effect of alternating crops, “a point that has been well established by the experience of the forty years that have passed since Arthur Young”. He then describes the topography and soil of his estate, and finally reports the spontaneous successions of species he observed in the woods and meadows. His observations and his “experiments” in the field are complemented by notes on the forestry archives that came with one of his property titles. Even the lawn of his Paris home offers him another example: it was entirely seeded in Graminaceae in 1820, all other plants were uprooted for two years, and nonetheless it was enough that the weeding was interrupted for a little less than a year for half the lawn to be taken over by wild clover (Trifolium repens L.). Dureau concluded that his observations were sufficient to extend the theory of alternation, which is the “basis of all good agriculture”, to all plants, annual or not, grouped or isolated, and to consider it as “a fundamental law imposed on vegetation by the author of all that exists”.
