NO FIXED RULE AS TO TIME. 51 



save the sugar, starch and soluble salts, that go to make up 

 the nutritive properties of the plants. You must do that 

 either by allowing your grass to stand until it comes to that 

 point where there is the most of that nutritive property in it, 

 or you must cut it before that time comes, and let that nutritive 

 property be generated in the grass as it is dried and put into 

 the mow. For instance, immature grass is very deficient in 

 the nutritive elements that I have spoken of ; every chemist 

 knows it, — and the tests which have been applied to immature 

 plants show that they are deficient in them. Now, you can gen- 

 erate or create these nutritive elements by cutting and drying 

 your grass, but of course you get much less to the acre or half 

 acre by producing them in that way than you do by letting the 

 plant stand until it has arrived at that point where the woody 

 fibre is the least, and the nutritive elements of the plant are in 

 the largest proportion. 



Now, I am sure that the time when the plant has reached 

 that point of economy to the farmer, and of the largest nutri- 

 tion to the animal which consumes it, is just exactly the point 

 of time which Prof. Chadbourne has specified ; that is, the time 

 of leaving the blossom and going into the process of creating 

 seed, and before the process of making seed has taken up all 

 those nutritive elements of which I have spoken, and which pre- 

 sented themselves in the end of the stalk of grass out of which 

 the milk was squeezed by the thumb-nail of the experimenter. 

 That seems to me to be a good law. 



Experience shows that we cannot lay down any definite time 

 for the cutting of grasses. We have in Essex County, in the 

 marshes, what we call black grass, and a very useful kind of 

 grass it is. Black grass allowed to stand until the middle of 

 July is comparatively worthless ; cut when it is just in the con- 

 dition I have described, which is generally about the twenty- 

 fourth of June, it is about as useful grass as we have. Now, 

 in our section, the period of time when it arrives at the point 

 which I have laid down varies very much from year to year. 

 This last summer, it was late ; the summer before last it was 

 early. A field which some years you could cut to a profit on the 

 fourth of July, you could not cut to a profit another year until the 

 twelfth of July. And so it is with other grasses — clover and 

 herdsgrass. 



