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from an acute disease which the medical men said any sedentary 

 occupation, such as engineering, would have greatly aggravated, 

 and my father happening to have a farm in charge of a Scotch 

 steward, this seemed to offer the very occupation desired. Coming 

 quite fresh and ignorant to so novel an occupation as wheat- 

 growing, I became possessed vidth the idea that large ears would 

 produce large ears, and finding, after diligent research, that there 

 was no recorded experience upon the subject, I at once set to 

 work to study the growth and nature of the wheat plant, I 

 determined to treat the plant as if it were an entirely new one, 

 and planted single grains a long way apart, in order to study 

 their development. Let us then see, by following its growth, 

 what the nature of the plant is. A grain of wheat planted at a 

 certain depth below the surface sends up first a single stem, its 

 rootlets being simultaneously developed. Shortly after this first 

 stem appears well above the ground it throws out a succession of 

 new stems ; as each of these commences to form, a new rootbud 

 is developed from its support ; and as these new stems bend down 

 and grow out horizontally over the surface, the respective new 

 roots are correspondingly developed beneath it. The process is 

 called " tillering." At the proper season it ceases, the stems rise 

 to a vertical position, develope their ears, and grow upwards to 

 maturity. The extent to which this tillering may go may be 

 gathered from the three following facts as to the roots, the stems, 

 and the ears produced. 



1. — In 1862 I had two boxes made— each two feet square 

 and two feet deep, having a capacity of eight cubic feet in each. 

 In each I had a living plant of wheat from one single grain. In 

 order to show at the Battersea Exhibition of the Eoyal Agricultu- 

 ral Society the root development, I had a large portion of one side 

 of each box made as a door ^vith hinges. Upon these being 

 opened it was at once seen that the roots completely filled the 

 •whole box and the extremities of the rootlets formed at the side of 

 the box a dense white mass exactly as do those of a plant left too 

 long in a flower-pot not sufSciently large for it. 



