146 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. 



weeds. Most farmers do it, but they cannot afford it. I have 

 raised about as good a crop of weeds, I presume, as any one in 

 this room, and I think it was the most unprofitable crop I ever 

 grew. There are a great many objections to raising weeds. 

 One is, you exhaust the soil, to some extent. Another is, if 

 you don't cut them off before they have gone to seed, you will 

 fill the land full of seed, which it will take years to get rid of, 

 if any of it is ploughed in very deep. Take Roman wormwood, 

 for example, which will not germinate if it is two inches below 

 the surface. You cannot reach it, therefore, all at once, and 

 you will be troubled a great while for a little neglect in allowing 

 the weeds to grow. 



All farmers should endeavor to make some improvement in 

 their vegetables. It is a very easy matter, I think, to improve 

 your varieties by cross fertilization. Take any variety of field 

 corn, and I have no doubt that inside of five years I could improve 

 the productiveness and earliness of that variety from ten to 

 twenty per cent. You see the point. If that is true, and it 

 could be done throughout the State, you see what an addition 

 it would be to the corn crop, simply from having good seed. 

 Now, if you cross the seed of any varieties, and get what you 

 want, the tendency of that seed will be to revert back to one of 

 the original parents ; perhaps the one you want least. I might 

 illustrate that by taking corn. Suppose you have a very early 

 variety of corn. Earliness is usually associated with fulness of 

 size, and small corn is not usually so productive as large. You 

 want to retain that earliness, and at the same time increase the 

 size, and you cross that with a larger variety. Well, after you 

 have got what you want, then will come your trouble, to some 

 extent. You will want to save the seed, and the most natural 

 thing for a farmer to do is to save the largest ears that grow on 

 his field, and it is just those ears in which the tendency to run 

 back to the original parent, which was late, is most strongly 

 developed. If you plant the seed from the largest ears that are 

 produced on your field for three or four years, you will very 

 nearly run that corn back to the original late parent ; whereas, 

 if you select just the ear you want, at the time it is maturing, 

 so as always to get size and earliness, you will perpetuate the 

 desirable variety, to a considerable extent. 



