575, 



for market, and my impression is that it has in a great measure run out, 

 from having been grown too many successive years on the same soil, 

 with the same unskillful course of cultivation. In the tields I have 

 found the straw short and wanting in stoutness, the heads small and 

 scantily filled, seldom containing over thirty-five or forty grains, many 

 of them imperfect, as if the plant had been unable, from lack of 

 strength, to ripen all alike. Even the sound grains were far from per- 

 fect, less than medium in size, and the spikelets seemingly wilted away. 



Of the good qualities of this wheat, and its capacity to make fine 

 flour, I make no denial ; but I think it full time that ways and means 

 were devised to introduce a more profitable variety, and one possessing 

 the same good qualities combined with some which it confessedly does 

 not possess. 



Just calculate for yourselves what the result would be, if instead of 

 having a field of wheat each eir of which produced on an average from 

 thirty to forty medium sized grains, you had one which gave you from 

 the same number of stalks, heads containing from fifty to sixty large 

 sized, well developed grains. Would you not have an increase of more 

 than one-third at the weighing scale of the buyer ? and that is the test- 

 ing point for the farmer of good or bad seed. Instead of raising a crop 

 only equal to the average — the fifteen bushels cited as that averaged by 

 Hillsdale county in 1853 — he can reasonably calculate on at least one- 

 third more. Remember that length of head, as a general rul6, counts 

 more to the acre than numerous stalks. 



There is another matter in relation to wheat which I cannot better 

 illustrate than by the relation of a transaction which took place under 

 my own observation this fall. A few weeks ago, a farmer from one of 

 the counties near Detroit, brought a lot of wheat to market, but it was 

 so foul, and apparently so full of all kinds of seed except sound wheat, 

 that he could not get an offer for it. Finally, a dealer tendered him a 

 dollar a bushel, which the farmer accepted. The buyer's friends thought 

 he had a hard bargain, but he resolved to test that question. So he 

 hired three laboring men, and having a fanning mill of his own, he set 

 them to cleaning the wheat. They worked at it a day, running it three 

 times through the mill, and by night from six to eight bushels of chess 

 and light wheat had been taken from the lot. But the weight of the 

 whole had only been reduced three bushels. The next day the same 



