218 TRANSACTIONS OF THE AMERICAN INSTITUTE. 



Mr. Gale referred to the question suggested last week whether 

 oats or wheat ever turn to chess, and suggested the appointment 

 of a committee to experiment and determine whether chess will 

 produce wheat, and whether the turnip and the cabbage will 

 intermix. 



Mr. Carpenter said that if we sowed pure grain we should reap 

 pure grain, provided no chess had been grown there before. 

 Chess is a very hardy plant, will stand any severity of the wea- 

 ther, and seems to do well just where wheat will not do well, in 

 low wet places. 



Mr. Robinson. — I had a water example last week, and now I 

 will produce a dr}"- land example. Upon the same prairie which 

 had the wet place in the center, where chess took the place of 

 wheat, upon the highest part of the prairie and upon as dry land 

 as one would wish for a garden, one of my neighbors sowed in 

 the spring a field of oats. After harvesting the oats, he ploweid 

 the ground and sowed timothy. The oats were clean and the 

 timothy seed was clean, yet the result was neither timothy nor 

 oats, but chess. I do not believe that the oats turned to chess, 

 but I know that if chess had been in the ground it had lain there 

 a good while, for I was the first occupant of the ground, and I 

 know that no chance sowing, since America was discovered, had 

 put chess seed there. 



Dr. Holton undertook to explain the possibility upon physi- 

 ological principles that wheat might turn to chess. The com- 

 mencement of vegetable, as of animal growth, is a cell, composed 

 of an envelope and its contents. The contents appear under the 

 microscope to be a homogeneous uniform mass. Then there 

 appears in the cell a darkened spot, a nucleus, or center of 

 growth, and the cell divides and becomes two. Like produces 

 like. A wheat cell will produce a wheat cell. But there are 

 exceptions arising from external causes. The instances of such 

 exceptions and of abnormal growth are abundant. The forma- 

 tion of a cancer in the human system is an illustration. ^So it 

 may be consistent with nature that wheat cells, from some foreign 

 impulse, may abnormally develope the cells of chess. 



Dr. Trimble mentioned instances where an abundant crop of 

 white clover and of red clover, had sprung up, where apparently 

 there had been no seed planted. 



Mr. Gale said that a place might be cleared in the centre of 

 the woods, anywhere, and white clover would grow there; but 



