96 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. 



3d — The seeds sown should be exactly adapled to the soil and 

 climate. This rule is too obvious for argument. It is clear that if 

 seeds which will only germinate and flourish in sandy soils are 

 sown on wet clays they will be sickly and unprofitable ; and so on 

 the other hand, we cannot expect those that are adapted to soils 

 where potash abounds to flourish in soils that are almost wholly 

 calcareous. And yet, although this is so clear, and so fully com- 

 mends itself to the approval of every man, yet no one thinks for 

 a moment of practicing it. If a farmer wishes to lay down a 

 meadow, no matter whether it is wet or dry, clayey or sandy, cal- 

 careous or peaty, the same uniform timothy and clover is univer- 

 sally applied and if these do not grow he is quite contented with 

 a crop of weeds. As I have before remarked, there is some kind 

 of grass just adapted to every soil under the sun, and the intelli- 

 gent farmer in the "good time coming" will never rest until he 

 finds from actual experiment, the exact species just calculated for 

 his own land. „ 



4th — We must stock our meadows with the viosl nutritive grasses. 

 If you have looked at a table of grass analyses, and if you com- 

 pared them, you must have been struck with the wide difference 

 in nutritive value which exists among them. There have been 

 two attempts at a chemical determination of these values on an 

 extended scale ; the first by Mr. Sinclair under the guidance of 

 Sir Humphrey Davy, of 113 varieties ; the second by Mr. Way, 

 chemist to the Royal Agricultural Society, of 21 varieties ; besides 

 these, we are in possession of several analyses of separate grasses 

 by other distinguished chemists. 



Mr. Sinclair's method consisted in submitting the green or dry 

 grasses to the action of hot water so long as it continued to take 

 up any soluble matter ; the solution being then evaporated to 

 dryness the solid residuum was weighed, this was taken as repre- 

 senting the absolute weight of nutritive matter contained in the 

 grass under examination. This process is now known to be inac- 

 curate, as vegetable albumin which contains the greatest amount of 

 tthe muscle forming elements is not- taken up by boiling water and 

 the presence of this substance was not therefore brought to light 

 by Sinclair. 



Indeed, Sir Humphrey Davy, who furnished the process, seems 

 to have had much less confidence in its accuracy than Mr. Sin- 

 clair. Sir II. remarked, that the nutritive matter of grasses or 



