396 Bureau' of Farmers' Institutes. 



Tull says in 1733, * " English gardeners make 40 pounds off an 

 acre of asparagus with half the labor these Romans bestowed on an 

 acre of Medica — but as the Roman empire was then in its glory, 

 and Rome the metropolis of the world, where all the richness of 

 the earth was drawn together, the price of hay may have war- 

 ranted this great outlay of labor. Again, the Romans had not 

 only servants, but plenty of slaves, for whom they had scarce 

 sufficient employment, and this might lessen the expense of this 

 tedious method of planting and ordering the Medica. But when 

 the Romans were brought down to the level of other nations, and 

 were in danger of being slaves instead of having them, and the 

 lands of Italy came to be cultivated by Italian hands only, they 

 found something else more necessary to employ them in, than the 

 Sarritions, Runcations and Rigations of the Medica, and their la- 

 bor being bestowed in getting bread for themselves, they substi- 

 tuted other grasses of more easy culture for the food of their cat- 

 tle, and they were so bigoted to all the superstitions of their ances- 

 tors that they were content to lose the use of that most beneficial 

 plant, rather than to cultivate it by a new, though more rational 

 method, when they had become unable longer to continue it by the 

 old. And so superstition chased lucern from the Roman empire." 



In 1653 Walter Blith, advises in his quaint book, " The English 

 Improver Improved or the Survey of Husbandry Surveyed," 

 the English farmer to try to grow " La lucern, a Erench grass 

 which is excellent fodder, and should be experimented with, as 

 every day will bring forth something or other worth our embrace- 

 ment." 



Seventy-five years later Jethro Tull is urging English farmers 

 to grow it by his method of hoeing — which he seemed to think 

 was a panacea for all the ills that agriculture was heir to, and so on 

 down as books were more easily written we find men telling of the 

 virtues of lucern; but in my effort to show that it is not a new 

 plant, or rather a newly cultivated plant, I am losing sight of 

 the question. It is, according to Prof. Smith, 2 " an upright, branch- 

 ing, smooth, perennial, growing from one to three 3 feet high, with 

 three parted leaves, each leaflet broadest above the middle. The 

 purple flowers are in long, loose clusters or racemes. The ripe 

 pods are spirally twisted, and each contains several seeds." The 

 young plants resemble sweet clover, and many men who have 



Jethro Tull's Horse Hoeing, 1733. 

 1 Jared G. Smith, U. S. Dept., 1900. 



3 I have often seen it four feet high In places In fields where the moisture condi- 

 tions were favorable. 



