324 [Senate 



has passed the period of its highest strength and vigor, cannot, as I 

 think, be aware how much he is losing by his mistake. He loses 

 more every year in his crop of grass, than would be sufficient to pur- 

 chase all the seed he wants; (which by the way, he ought to raise;) 

 and when the time at last ccmes round that the " meadow must be 

 broken up," his greensward crop, unless highly manured, is but a 

 scanty remuneration for his labor and seed; the sod remains tough 

 and unchanged, and the land must be cropped and cropped to subdue 

 it; until at length not only the sod, but the soil is subdued, and ren- 

 dered unfit for seeding down, or for profitable tillage. Its lost ferti- 

 lity must now be restored; and to this end, it is manured and crop- 

 ped, and manured and cropped again, until the crop of weeds and 

 thistles becomes sufficiently abundant, to fill the owner's largest wish- 

 es, when it must be " seeded down.'''' But it is thinly seeded, or the 

 seed does not take well; or it is smothered by the weeds; so the first 

 crop of grass is a crop of thistles, and the succeeding ones but little 

 else; till at length the ground becomes so solid, that thistles will not 

 grow — when the more hardy grasses " come in," and the field once 

 more gets to bearing 2, fine crop of still finer hay. This I am certain 

 is no fancy sketch, having taken it from real life. But it may be 

 asked what has all this to do with your crop of oatsi Certainly noth- 

 ing directly, but indirectly much; as it represents the incapability of 

 the soil in this field to produce a heavy greensward, crop and the pre- 

 vious management by which this incapacity may have been induced. 



But I proposed to offer two reasons for this not having been a lar- 

 ger crop. And secondly^ then. 



The kind of oats was not the most productive. Had I been as well 

 acquainted with it as I now am, before sowing last spring, I should 

 not then have sowed a single bushel of it. I had raised of it only a 

 single season. Being introduced to my notice by a friend of mine, 

 who by the way is not apt to be so deceived by appearances, I took 

 it " upon trust" to be what he had supposed it to be, " a little better 

 kind than any other." And to make the most of what seed I was 

 unfortunate enough to obtain, I sowed six bushelsby weight, or about 

 five by measure, on something more than three acres of ground. 



The growth of straw was good; but the yield of grain, on thresh- 

 ing, came far short of what I had expected, and I began to fear that 

 all was not right. But as I had no proof in the case, having no oth- 

 er kind of oats in the same field, and especially as I did noiknow but 

 the thin seeding might have been the sole cause of my disappoint- 

 ment, I determined to sow it at least another season, and give it a 

 fair trial. This I have now done; and although perfectly satisfied my- 

 self, the 'proof shall be given, that others may judge for themselves. 



For this experiment, I selected a portion of" Field No. 3," "Lot B," 

 where, from the previous crops of hay, I knew the condition and quality 

 of the soil to be very nearly uniform. I then sowed a strip just two 

 rods wide and some twenty long, with Potatoe Oats, and another strip 

 exactly as wide and long at the side of it, with just the same quanti- 

 ty of seed of a common variety. And lest there might exist a slight 

 difference in the condition of the soil, too small to have been percei- 



