94 * BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. 



spaces of unoccupied soil, and the ground will not be thoroughly 

 turfed over until you have from five to twenty varieties growing 

 upon it. Experience has most conclusively shown that any soil 

 will yield a larger and more nutritive crop when sown with from 

 five to ten species of seeds than when only one or two species are 

 growing. It lias long been known to physiologists, that man 

 absolutely requires a mixed diet ; he cannot maintain the due exer- 

 cise of all his faculties and functions if fed exclusively on a single 

 article of diet, even if that article should be of the most nutritive 

 character. It is the same with our domestic animals, they will 

 not flourish as well on the most nutritive kind of hay of a single 

 species as they will on a mixture, each individual of which may 

 be inferior to the first. The animal tissues require numerous ele- 

 ments for their support, and these elements are furnished in greater 

 abundance, and better adapted for assimilation by a mixture of 

 dissimilar grasses than by any single one. Nature teaches this 

 doctrine very clearly, independently of theoretical considerations. 

 The horse when at liberty to choose will always leave the single 

 one for the mixture. On a very rich old pasture which fattened 

 one large ox and three sheep per acre, one thousand plants stood 

 on one square foot of ground, of which nine hundred and forty 

 were natural grasses, and sixty were creeping rooted clover and 

 other plants ; there were twenty distinct species of plants on this 

 square foot of ground. 



On a well managed water meadow, there were on a square foot, 

 one thousand seven hundred and ninety-eight plants, embracing 

 one thousand seven hundred and two plants of the natural grasses, 

 and ninety-six of the clovers and other plants. Now compare this 

 wonderful luxuriance with the produce of an equal space of land 

 with a single species of grass. A single square foot where nothing 

 but narrow leaved meadow grass (Poa anguslifolia,) grew, con- 

 tained one hundred and ninety-two plants — of meadow fox-tail 

 (Alopecurus pratensis,) eighty-two plants — of rye grass (Lolium 

 perrene,) seventy-five plants. Compare seventeen hundred and 

 ninety-eight with seventy- five plants to a square foot and you will 

 at once see how desirable and how profitable is the sowing a great 

 variety of seeds. You will see how much is annually lost to the 

 country for want of a greater variety of plants in our meadows 

 and pastures, for the farmers in the United States who sow more 

 than two kinds of seeds might be comfortably accommodated in a 

 moderate sized church. 



