YARIOU3 KINDS OE SEED. 17 



Prance. In short, they have just as much need of an 

 interchange with us, as we have of a reciprocity with them. 



The degeneration of the Livonian seed appears to arise 

 from its being grown on land that is too light to suit it. 

 In Holland, it has been generally remarked, light and 

 sandy soils produce flax which is delicate in sample, but 

 small in quantity ; the seed degenerates from the first or 

 second year. On clayey, deep, and stiff soils, which are 

 inclined to be moist, the quantity of flax yielded is greater, 

 and the seed is excellent. The Dutch sow scarcely any 

 flax in the province of Holland where the soil is light 

 and sandy ; but they grow as good flax and as good seed 

 as any in Europe, on the clayey, deep, heavy, stiff, and 

 somewhat wet land, of the province of Zealand. In 

 Livonia this plant is never grown, except in fields whose 

 surface is black, and whose subsoil is firm and rich. 



Moreover, it is a notorious fact, in the first place, that 

 the Dutch, who for a long while had almost exclusive 

 possession of the trade in Riga flax-seed, often sub- 

 stituted, without the difference being discovered, seed 

 which had been grown in Zealand (that is to say, in a 

 country which borders on Flanders), and which had pro- 

 bably been cultivated on the best land, and according to 

 the principles requisite to obtain the finest sample of 

 seed ; since the seed is equally liable to degenerate with 

 them on all soils which are not essentially adapted to its 

 culture, or when more regard is paid to the fineness of 

 the fibre than to the perfecting the seed. In the second 

 place, it is very well known, that both in Prance and in 

 Italy, people have often succeeded in obtaining seed of a 

 quality far superior to that which is obtained by the ordi- 

 nary mode of culture, in which extreme fineness of the 

 fibre is the essential, if not the only object, and that 

 always by following these very same principles. 



The inference from such positive and conclusive facts 

 as these would seem to be, that it is not indispensably 

 necessary to import seed from Higa, or from any other 

 distant spot, in order to obtain a crop with the requisite 

 degree of vigour. The reader will be the more disposed 



c 



