sure supplied by imparting an additional fecundity to the soil, just as a mother without milk may bring up her babe by feeding it with pap. The cases are sufficiently analogous: in both, the offspring exchanges its natural for an artificial and vicarious food. It is much to be apprehended, that although shrivelled kernels may very well succeed as an experiment in a garden pot, or in a very rich soil and warm situation, they would miserably frustrate the expectation and punish the credulity of a farmer, if employed on an extensive scale, without peculiar advantages of soil, season, and situation, and without an extraordinary measure of manure. But I fear that experiments on the vegetation of suspected seeds have been too commonly made in some snug sheltered corner of a fertile garden; or we put a little rich mould into a pot, and bring it into the house: the seeds sprout, are carefully watered, and nursed up, and a hasty, dangerous inference is deduced, that refuse corn may as safely be employed for seed as the plumpest and the soundest kernels: thus are chickens cheated of their victuals, and the crops of the whole country exposed to imminent danger through a mistaken and pitiful economy. The late Mr. Benjamin Bell, of Edinburgh, communicated an Essay to the Highland Society, which was published in their Transactions, on the influence of frost and other varieties of bad weather on the ripening of corn. He instituted a series of experiments on a very large scale, and conducted them carefully: the perusal of his paper will make those shudder who have put to peril the agricultural produce of the country by the rashness of their theories. It is some years since I read it, but I well remember regarding it as a useful paper, intelligent and intelligible, on a most important subject.[1]
On heavy lands the progress of infant vegetation is always languid: when a seed first germinates, it is obvious that the plumula and the radicle must be much longer in struggling through stiff clods of earth, than when they have only to insinuate their easy courses through a pulverized and unresisting soil; and at the time of year when our wheats are usually committed to the ground, the difference of a few days only in the time of sowing is on some soils succeeded by a difference of weeks in the first appearance of the crops. November may be considered as the commencement of our winter: the season now grows cold and rainy, and the wheat which at that time remains in a heavy, strong and undrained soil, or which just peeps through the surface, has many sad vicissitudes of weather to encounter in its first feeble state, and lies a long time exposed to the depredations of hungry birds. I suspect, that on
- ↑ It was published in the third volume of the Prize Essays of the Highland Society of Scotland.
