164 SEVENTEENTH REPORT. 



DK. BEAL'S SEED VITALITY EXPERIMENTS. 



BY H. T. DARLINGTON. 



Ill the antiimii of 1879 Dr. Beal began an experiment to test the 

 vitality of the seeds of some of the most common plants, growing in 

 the vicinity of the Agricultnral College. An account of the ex- 

 periment appeared in the Botanical Gazette, August 1905, giving a 

 report for the first twenty-five 3^ears, and again in the Thirty-first 

 Annual Report of the Society for Agricultural Science, bringing the 

 results up to and including the year 1909. I shall give a brief sur- 

 vey of the experiment up to date. 



As to the nature of the experiment, I cannot do better than quote 

 Dr. Beal himself. He says, "I selected fifty freshly grown seeds 

 from each of twenty-three different kinds of plants. Twenty such 

 lots were prepared with the view of testing them at different times 

 in the future. Each lot or set of seeds was well mixed in moderately 

 moist sand, just as it was taken three feet below the surface, where 

 the land had never been plowed. The seeds of each set were well 

 mixed with the sand and placed in a pint bottle, the bottle being 

 filled and left uncorked, and placed with the mouth slanting down- 

 wards, so that water could not accumulate about the seeds. These 

 bottles were buried on a sandy knoll in a row running east and 

 west and placed fifteen paces northwest from the west end of the 

 big stone set by the class of 1873. A boulder stone, barely even 

 with the surface soil, was set at each end of the row of bottles, 

 which was buried about twenty inches below the surface of the 

 ground." So much for Dr. Beal's description of the experiment. 



A set of seeds has been tested every five years. At this rate, as 

 twenty sets w^ere buried, there will be enough to last a whole century 

 from the time the experiment was started. 



The following is a list of the seeds tested, giving the names then 

 in use: — Amaranthus retroflexus, Ambrosia artemisiaefolia. Bras- 

 sica nigra, Bormus secalinus, Capsella Bursa-pastoris, Erechthites 

 hieracifolia, Euphorbia inaculata, Lepidium virginicum. Lychnis 

 Githago, Maruta Cotula, Malva rotundifolia, Oenothera biennis, 

 Plantago major. Polygonum Hydroi)iper, Portulaca oleracea, Quer- 

 cus rubra, Rumex crispus, Setaria glauca, Stellaria media. Thuja 

 occidentalis, Trifolium repens mihI Verbascum Thapsus. 



