54 VEGETABLE SUBSTANCES. 



districts to the south of the Baltic Sea and the Gulf 

 of Finland, furnishing abundance of food for the nu- 

 merous inhabitants of places which, without it, must 

 have been little better than sandy and uninhabitable 

 deserts. In these districts it not only forms the chief 

 article of consumption, but furnishes a material of 

 some consequence to the export trade of the Prussian 

 ports. 



The peasantry in Sweden subsist very generally 

 upon rye-cakes, which they bake only twice in the 

 course of the year, and which, during most part of 

 the time, are consequently as hard as a board. 

 Linnaeus observed a curious practice in Lapland. One 

 part of rye and two parts of barley being mixed to- 

 gether, the seed is committed to the ground as soon 

 as the earth is capable of tillage in the spring. The 

 barley shoots up vigorously, ripens its ears and is 

 reaped; while the rye merely goes into leaf without 

 shooting up any stem, its growth being retarded by 

 the barley, which may be said to smother it. After 

 the barley is reaped, the rye advances in growth, and, 

 without any farther care of the cultivator, yields an 

 abundant crop in the following year. 



This grain, to which so many human beings are thus 

 indebted for aliment, is subject to a disease which, 

 when it occurs, not only deprives it of all its useful 

 properties as food, but renders it absolutely noxious, 

 and, it may even be said, poisonous to man. When 

 thus diseased it is called by English farmers horned 

 rye, and by the French ergot, from the fancied re- 

 semblance to a cock's spur of an excrescence which 

 the grain then bears. Whenever this disease has 

 been witnessed, it has usually happened that a wet 

 spring has been succeeded by a summer more than 

 ordinarily hot. Tissot, a French physician, bestowed 

 much attention on this subject, and upon its melan- 

 choly consequences. It is from him we learn that the 



