DISTRIBUTION OF SEEDS. 101 



It should be a great object of agricultural societies as well as of horti- 

 cultural societies to gratuitously distribute, as far as practicable, among its 

 members, all new and really useful articles, and it might be the aim of 

 such societies to be the mediums of National or State bounty. Many a 

 farmer would prize more highly a dozen scions of a new fruit than a vol- 

 ume on foreign agriculture, or a dollar or two as a gratuity, and a paper of 

 choice seeds is more valuable than a silver medal. Much of the mischief 

 which arises from the indiscriminate scattering of seeds and roots around 

 the country, would be thus avoided. There are certain vegetables, for 

 instance, that are so ill suited to our climate that they are grown with the 

 greatest difficulty. Many years ago I was requested by an intelligent and 

 practical farmer to inform him of the name and nature of some strange- 

 looking plants which he had raised from seeds sent him from Washington ; 

 he was in doubt whether they were thistles and dandelions or no, and he 

 was equally astonished and chagrined to learn that the thistles were arti- 

 chokes and the dandelions were endive,— the former to be boiled for the 

 table something like a cabbage, and the other to be blanched and eaten as 

 a salad. " What, eat thistle heads," said he, " and devour such a bitter thing, 

 when lettuce is so much better ?" Some seeds of the same lot produced 

 beets, but they were all tops and had no roots, very ill adapted either for the 

 table or for feeding out. Who does not remember the Tree corn, fitted 

 only for a southern culture, if good for anything ? And the Cesarean cab- 

 bage or kale, one plant sufficient to keep a cow, and two or three would 

 save barn yard and hay stock ? Not long ago, I was favored with the 

 flowers and stem of a Spanish plant, sown with great care as a new spin- 

 ach, but digestible only in the stomach of the most indigent or the most 

 vagrant of animals. The chufas, or earth almonds, have received consid- 

 erable censure ; I have long been acquainted with them, many years before 

 they were distributed from the Patent Office ; and whoever loves to eat 

 peanuts might have a hankering after these little rootlets — in both cases 

 the task is somewhat porcine. Varieties of peas, long known to our farm- 

 ers and gardeners and laid aside for better varieties, are received by favored 

 individuals as especially excellent and neio sorts. Grass seeds, fitted only 

 for warmer parts of the country, where the herbage lacks the softness and 

 fineness of our pastures, are useless or worse than useless to us. Along 

 our railroad tracks, straying from old cornfields and rye fields, and bloom- 

 ing late in autumn, is a caryophyllaceous plant, with succulent, needle- 

 shaped leaves, called Spurry, — a worthless, insignificant, introduced weed, 

 yet recommended for cultivation for feeding sheep. Its adaptation to the 

 poor gravel of the rail-track bed may be something in its favor for poor 

 gravelly soils elsewhere on the farm, yet we have better plants than it to 

 sow there, and birch trees and pitch pines would yield a better crop. 



The duty of your Committee having for its consideration " the distribu- 

 tion of seeds from the Patent Office," at Washington, leads me naturally 

 into the train of thought now laid before us. The origin of the labors and 

 avocation of this department of the Patent Office is unknown to me. I 

 cannot but feel that the motive was praiseworthy, and the object was in- 



