342 AgricuUural Report. ^Sbpt. 



As we stated in our last, the original mischief occurred within the three or four 

 frosty nights of JNIaj, induced by a shivering and blasting N. E. wind, by which a full 

 moiety of our national stock of fruit, of every description, was cut ott at a stroke. 

 Most of the early sown turnips were simultaneously destroyed, ploughed up, and 

 re-sown under happier auspices. Had this inauspicious state of the weather conti- 

 nued but a few days longer, or to the length experienced in certain former unfortu- 

 nate years, a famine — at least, high famine prices — must have been the inevitable 

 consequence, from the obvious difficulty, under such circumstances, of obtaining 

 adequate supplies from the Continent : other consequences, in regard to our nu- 

 merous unemployed labouring population, are too obvious to need being adverted 

 to. Fortunately, this plague was stayed in saving and good time ; the capricious 

 elements changed their tone, and this calamitous state of the weather was suc- 

 ceeded, during a considerable length, by its direct opposite, under which our crops 

 enjoyed the benefit of being fanned and cheered by mild and genial south-western 

 breezes, and of being pushed forward to an early harvest, by the power of a constant 

 and ardent solstitial heat, to the utter overthrow of the predictions of us wise-acres, 

 who seemed determined that the harvest of the present year should be of the latest 

 ever experienced m this country. Very few culmiferous crops have escaped 

 without exhibiting, upon the straw or husjis of the ear, apjjearances of one or other 

 of the several aftections of atmospheric blight. They are both rusted and blacked, 

 the fatal mildew succeeding to too great an extent, by which the milky substance of 

 the kernel is dried up, and itself reduced to an almost empty husk, of a burnt and 

 unpleasant scent. There is very little complaint of smut, or the black and foetid 

 disease in wheat, by which, through the evil' influence of the atmosphere, the 

 kernels, few or more in an ear, are changed into balls (smut balls), containing a por- 

 tion of foetid black powder. The mildew seems to have prevailed most, and most 

 fatally, in the maritime counties, and chiefly in those lands bordering on the sea- 

 coast ; also in the fen districts. In less exposed situations, it may be hoped that the 

 effects of the blast have been only external, reaching no farther than tne stalk and 

 the chaff. Thus we have found it on certain light loams of this county, a few mil., 

 dewed kernels in many, or most of the ears, disgracing the general sample of excel- 

 lent, plump, and fine-coloured wheat. The ears of middling and poor soils are not 

 very long or large, and their numerical contents in kernels, so far as we have num- 

 bered and averaged them, are far below those on which we have made similar ex- 

 periment in former prolific years. The barley is said to have suffered, notwith- 

 standing the protection of its awns and spikes, nearly as much as the wheat. On 

 those fortunate soils where, according to the accounts from their happy cultivators, 

 the blight had no influence (here we have our doubts), all the crops of corn and 

 pulse are described as first-rate, both as to quantity and quality. Some of our friends, 

 however, remind us of our last year's caution, and, ere they give a final opinion, 

 are determined to await the result of a barn-floor test. The very moderate quality 

 of the new wheats exposed to sale, and the rising prices, do not seem to sanction the 

 splendid expectations of certain over-sanguine reporters. We have heard little yet 

 from the south-western, north-western, and midland counties ; our intelligence has 

 been chiefly derived from the southern, eastern, and north-eastern. 



The early turnips which withstood the shock in May, and those which were re- 

 sown, have proceeded most luxuriantly. It has been said, " they grew so fast as to 

 out-grow the fly ;" but we apprehend it may be said more correctly, that the second 

 sowing had the advantage of a more mild and genial season, whence no blight ensued 

 to produce the fly ; and that the aphides, or blight-insects, are the effect, not the 

 cause, of blight. Scotland presents a strange deviation in the course of the weather 

 from all or most other parts of the island ; instead of being deluged with rain in 

 July, as was the case in many other parts, their lands have suttered from heat and 

 drought throughout the whole summer, to the premature ripening of their corn 

 crops, and burning up their first and second crops of grass — the latter too short to be 

 mown. Nearly all their crops are described as of good promise, with the singular 

 advantage, in a season like the present, of being nearly free from the effects of 

 blight. The Scotch accounts, as usualof late years, are universally /y-A/otpn. We 

 repeat the acknowledgment of our last — we cannot understand them in that matter, 

 though we were formerly long aphis hunters, as well as fox-hunters, and most of the 

 former. In some parts of Scotland, it seems, the wheat crop has been reduced 25 

 per cent, by the ravages of this fly, which had been in existence some weeks before 

 the ear appeared. The " leg, or tuli)) root," an excrescent disease of wheat in 

 Scotland, to which we adverted in our last, is probably the ergot of the Conti- 



