1857.] Does Wheat Turn to Chess? 459 



instance, every ftirmer knows that white clover will spring up abund- 

 antly in fields where none has grown or been sown for five or tea 

 years, and where it must have lain in the earth during the whole 

 period; unless we adopt a still more extravagant theory than that 

 which we have been considering, and suppose that not only wheat 

 but corn, rye, oats, barley, pumpkins, and potatoes, all change to 

 chess. It is a curious fact in point here, that wheat found in the 

 folds of linen enclosing an Egyptian mummy, germinated and o'rew 

 luxuriantly, though it had, doubtless, been laying there 3,000 years. 

 This fact has been several times published. I am clearly of opinion 

 that if no chess was in our fields, and none was ever sown in them, 

 or carried there by bird or other animals, we should never again 

 hear of such a change as of wheat to chess, even though all the 

 seed sown were shriveled, (as was the case in 1849,) or sown on 

 the top of the ground, or injured by a severe winter, or pastured off 

 in the spring — all of them supposed to contribute to this result. I 

 will state some of the flicts which produced in me such a conviction 

 of the truth of the above opinion, that conclusive testimony alone 

 could change it. 



It is now probably 20 years since my father determined to raise 

 wheat alone, instead of wheat, rye, chess, and even cockle, as he 

 and his neighbors had been doing. The rye, being taller than the 

 wheat, was easily destroyed by cutting it out before harvest, and the 

 cockle was likewise soon overcome. As to destroying the chess, the 

 neighbors laughed at him, saying that the first hard winter would 

 again change the wheat to chess, and his labor would all be lost. — 

 Nevertheless, he undertook the experiment. I was then a youth at 

 home. We picked the seed carefully, head by head. Lest a single 

 grain might have got into it, we run it two or three times through a 

 fanning mill containing a good screen, each time entirely separating 

 the screenings from the seed. We then sowed it on the cleanest 

 ground that we had. We went through a similar process the two 

 succeeding years. Whenever a head or grain of chess was found 

 in harvesting, threshing, or winnowing the wheat, it was carefully 

 pocketed, carried to a fire, and burned. By this time is was almost 

 perfectly clear of the noxious weed, and would have been entirely 

 so, I have no doubt, had there been none of the seed in the ground. 

 After this, it was only necessary to screen the seed well in order to 

 secure at harvest a crop of almost pure wheat. Several years have 



