I cannot take leave of Sir Joseph's paper without risking a few remarks on another subject on which he has offered, what appears to me, some very hazardous advice in rather a peremptory tone. He says, that although the seeds of wheat are rendered so lean and shrivelled by the exhausting power of the fungus that scarcely any flour fit for the manufacture of bread can be obtained by grinding them, these very seeds will, except perhaps in the very worst cases, answer the purposes of seed corn as well as the fairest and plumpest sample that can be obtained. The use of the flour of corn in furthering the process of vegetation, he continues, is to nourish the minute plant from the time of its developement until its roots are able to attract food from the manured earth; and for this purpose one-tenth of the contents of a grain of good wheat is more than sufficient. Sir Joseph Banks proceeds to say that the selection of the plumpest grains for seed is an unnecessary waste of human subsistence, and he advises that what is usually thrown aside as dross, and given to the farmer’s poultry, should be employed for that purpose. In support of this advice reference is made to an experimental paper in the Annals of Agriculture by Mr. Mackie, which I confess I have not had the opportunity of perusing.
I may take the liberty of remarking that advice from so high a quarter, and pregnant with such momentous consequences ought not to be given without the utmost caution—without the utmost certainty of its safety. Sir Joseph has taken upon himself a vast responsibility only to be justified by a long and careful series of experiments, personally conducted by himself.
It is one thing to bring children into the world, it is another to rear them. Adam Smith remarks of the Highland women, that they frequently bear more than twenty and have not two alive! Poverty does not prevent generation, but is extremely unfavorable to the rearing of a progeny. Can we expect a vigorous and thriving child when we see the miserable disappointed wretch pressing the dry, milkless breast of a half-famished mother? Flour is to the infant plant what maternal milk is to the babe: if the corculum, the speck of vitality, is not injured, a seed when committed to the earth will certainly germinate. The cotyledons or lobes of the seed appear to be merely organs of nutrition, communicating the farinaceous substance of which they are composed to the young plant: if this nutritious substance is liberally communicated, which we suppose to be the case when the cotyledons are large and plump, the plant surely must thrive better and grow more rapidly than when the cotyledons, shrunk and shrivelled, distribute a parsimonious and scanty mucilage.
The deficiency in this latter case may, doubtless, be in some mea-
