1859.] BOTANICAL SKETCHES FROM CHESHIRE. 239 



repulsive, not in themselves, but by the manner in which they 

 have been treated ; but as the ' Phytologist ' is not the medium 

 for Circulating such facts, the less said on this head the better. 



It has been shown that the scenery from London to Chester 

 is of a very diversified character ; it has now to be shown that 

 the cereals, or, in plainer language, the grand sustainers of life, 

 the corn-crops, vary much in all these different parts of the 

 country. Not in bulk or luxuriance, and probably not in the 

 amount of produce, but they do differ considerably in their state 

 of forwardness. Between London and Oxford, the wheat on 

 the 20th June was fully grown, or, rather, it was beginning to 

 fill. This was the rule. Between Shrewsbury and Chester the 

 wheat was, with few exceptions, not yet fully grown. These 

 exceptional cases, however, show what good management and 

 skill can effect. Plants that were out of flower in London and 

 Middlesex a week or a fortnight before I left home, were still 

 blooming freshly in the gardens of Cheshire. 



Hence it is evident that the seasons are a week or ten days 

 later in the county palatine than in the metropolitan county. 



But where good farming prevailed, the difference in the for- 

 wardness of the crops was not so great between those of Mid- 

 dlesex and Shropshire as the natural difference in time between 

 the flowering of certain plants. Hence we learn the lesson that 

 industry, skill, capital, and watchfulness, can overcome even cli- 

 mate, changing it or forcing a late and unproductive into an 

 early and productive soil, and the cultivator thus gets a suffi- 

 cient recompense for his labour and outlay, and the community 

 gets the benefit of a larger and better supply at a smaller cost. 

 While on this subject, I may mention the essence of a conversa- 

 tion on this head with an intelligent Lancashire farmer. When 

 I told him that a Middlesex farmer usually reaped his oats 

 about the middle of July, and in early seasons at the begin- 

 ning of the month, he replied that the winter-sown oats did 

 not succeed in their county ; that the plant, being much ten- 

 derer than the wheat-plant, would not keep the ground in 

 winter. 



I. informed him that a Middlesex farmer never suffered the 

 almost total loss of his oat-crop from a long and severe drought 

 in the spring and beginning of summer, a state of things of 

 which some of the Lancashire farmers have painful testimony. 



