an uncertain evil. The very precautions may repel the evil which, without them, would invade us. As the interval between the last harvest and the present was little more than eleven months, we may expect that the interval between the present harvest and the next will be nearly thirteen. Harvest is unusually early this year; but this circumstance, added to the abundant crop and fine quality and weight of the last year’s wheats, gives us reason to believe that the stock in hand is considerable. To economize this stock until the quality of the present year’s produce is ascertained cannot be bad policy, nor can any alarm be injurious which promotes an economy of consumption. The accounts from Sussex, Surrey, Hampshire, Dorset, Somerset, Essex, Kent, Buckinghamshire, Norfolk, and Suffolk, and many parts of Scotland, concur in representing the wheat crop as deficient in quantity, and injured as to its quality.
A few years ago Sir Joseph Banks published "A short account of the causes of the diseases in corn, called by the farmers the Blight, the Mildew, and the Rust."[1] Without the assistance of the plates which accompany this ingenious paper, I shall scarcely be able to do justice to its contents. Botanists, says Sir Joseph, have long known that the blight in corn is occasioned by the growth of a minute parasitic fungus or mushroom on the leaves, stems, and glumes of the living plants. Of this fungus, in its different stages of growth and maturity, Mr. Bauer, botanical painter to the King, has made drawings from the original, very highly magnified, representing its destructive agency; in order to understand which, it is necessary to premise that the striped appearance of the surface of a straw is caused by alternate longitudinal partitions of the bark, the one imperforate and the other furnished with one or two rows of pores, which are shut in dry, open in wet weather. The intention of this arrangement, or the final cause, as some philosophers would call it, seems to be that whatever moisture is suspended in the atmosphere may be imbibed by the orifices when open, and afterwards that it may be retained by having the mouths of them closed.[2] Through these pores it is presumed that the seeds of the
- ↑ See Pamphleteer, No. XII. p. 401.
- ↑ A very curious and striking instance of a similar arrangement is exhibited in the Nepenthes Distillatoria, or Pitcher Plant, indigenous in the island of Java. Mr. Barrow gives the following account of it:—"Perhaps there is not," says he, "among the numerous examples that occur of the provident economy of nature in the vegetable part of the creation a more remarkable instance of contrivance adapted to circumstances, of means suited to the end, than what is evidently displayed in this wonderful plant. Being the inhabitant of a tropical climate, and found on the most stony and arid situations, nature has furnished it with the means of an ample supply of moisture, without which it would have withered and perished. To
