‘ 
REPORT OF M. HARDY. 837 
The majority of stalks attained a height of four or five yards; a 
great number did not exceed a thickness of ten to eleven centimetres. 
The seed ripens about the middle of September ; and despite the at- 
tacks of sparrows, the sixty-five square rods gave me four hundred 
and twenty-five kilogrammes of seed, which would equal two thousand 
five hundred kilogrammes per hectare. 
I have also cut the stalk, to make comparative weighings from 
various marked portions of the three plots. It was noticed that the 
plants had usually from three to seven stalks, (suckers,) or an average 
of five. The stalks stripped clean of their leaves, then deprived of 
the upper ends, which contain little or no saccharine matters, were 
reduced to an average length of 2-5 metres (a little over eight 
feet). From these pieces I obtained by weight a yield of = 250 kilo- 
grammes of saccharine stalks to the hectare. 
The preceding year, in my first experiment with the sugar sorgho, I 
had planted it in groups about two and a half feet apart each way. 
The stalks grew nearly like the crop of the present year ; but, crowded 
too much by this close planting, they did not attain the weight and 
diameter of this year’s stalks. Their yield per hectare was scarcely 
forty to forty-five thousand kilogrammes.* The spacing and mode of 
planting, in 1855, seemed entirely suitable for soils of good fertility, 
the only ones on which the sorgho culture should be attempted, if it 
is desired to obtain its full development and greatest possible yield. 
This wide culture likewise enables us to make use of horse tools, such 
as the horse-shoe for cultivation, and the light plow to make trenches 
for irrigation. 
_ The stalks bruised in a mortar after having been cut into small 
pieces, and then submitted to strong pressure, yielded sixty-seven per 
cent of sap. 
The juices had at the end of September, at the time of gathering 
the seed, a density of 83° Beaumé, which would indicate an approxi- 
mative saccharine richness of thirteen per cent. I distinctly say an 
approximative richness, not actual, for | have no saccharometer at this 
* Notre py Trans.—The crop of sorgho raised during the last season—1S56—at the 
Farm School, was planted in this manner—2's3 feet—six stalks to the hill. The 
plants attained an immense height, but were so weak as to be prostrated by a wind 
storm, and the seed did not ripen in consequence.—H. 9. O. 
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