154 MASSACHUSETTS AGRICULTURE. 



over the whole surface of the ground. Hill the corn and you 

 remove the soil from between the hills and rows, and the corn- 

 roots as instinctively reject these soilless places, as the potato- 

 sprouts reject the dark portions of the cellar and reach out 

 for the light. As the soil is heaped up around the stalks, in 

 about a compass of a half-bushel, the corn-roots may be found 

 mostly there, gnarled and knotted up, doing the best they 

 can. Again, if the soil is level, the showers wet the whole 

 surface of the ground, and the roots everywhere find drink. 

 On the other hand, the hills shed all the showers down into 

 the troughs and furrows, where there is no soil to tempt the 

 instinct of the rootlet to run. Nothing but a prolonged rain 

 can essentially benefit the gnarled roots, bound up in these 

 mounds of earth. One word more. If the last hoeing is 

 delayed till the corn has tasselled out, the roots at this stage 

 of growth spread everywhere where there is soil to invite 

 them, in search of food to strengthen for their work, and, as 

 if conscious of their inability, under the most favorable cir- 

 cumstances, they call for help, and the brave roots start forth 

 and plunge into the soil to aid. Both sets of roots now work 

 as near the surface as they can, as if to invoke the most ready 

 and powerful aid of the sun and atmosphere and dews and 

 rains, to aid them in their work of elaborating juice for the 

 stalk, juice to be distilled from the stalk into the kernel and 

 germ and vitality of the seed. The considerate farmer will 

 take his hoe and skim over the surface of his field as lightly 

 as he can, and kill the weeds and break the surface-crust. 

 Thus the roots are undisturbed and uninjured, and the hus- 

 bandman becomes an accordant helper in this work. By 

 destroying the vampire weeds, and opening the pores of the 

 soil, he has made it possible for the sun and atmosphere and 

 dews and rains to render a more direct and powerful aid in 

 maturing his crop and vitalizing his seed. 



Your Committee were gratified to see on exhibition a good 

 specimen of seed-wheat, raised in the Deerfield River Valley, 

 where our fathers reaped such golden fields of this best and 

 most healthful cereal. Everv farmer should know that wheat 

 craves lime and ashes in the soil, and that the stalk will be 

 weak, and crinkle and lodge down, and the seed will be 

 shrunk and blighted, where there is a lack of these. Now 



