WORCESTER SOCIETY. 179 



ence in favor of the two first modes of planting, especially of 

 the first. From these experiments, as well as from all my sub- 

 sequent ones, I am well settled in the opinion that if land, to 

 be planted, is favorably located for the sun, and is of a warm 

 and dryish nature, and the season such as to admit of early 

 planting, say between the 1st and 20th of May, spreading ma- 

 nure entirely, is decidedly the best, and in all cases to spread 

 the greater share, putting a little in the hill, on cold or moist 

 land, to give it an early start ; but in all cases to spread the ma- 

 nure, placing none in the hill for potatoes. My crops of corn 

 and potatoes on this lot were very large. On all the parts not 

 affected materially, by the previous buckwheat crop, I had not 

 less than seventy bushels of corn, and three hundred bushels of 

 potatoes per acre. 



I have, almost invariably, been successful in the cultivation 

 of corn. It has been my favorite crop, for the reason that no 

 crop, in all its stages of progress, possesses that richness, beauty 

 and grandeur, to behold. None of the grains require so small 

 a per centage for seed, or furnish such an abundance of the 

 richest of fodder for cattle, if well cured ; none (all things con- 

 sidered) so sure, and none at least more valuable. And here I 

 will allude, in confirmation of my success in the crop, to one 

 fact, not that I have been so successful as some of njy brethren, 

 who have raised a hundred, and even a hundred and ten bush- 

 els to the acre, but have always regarded half that quantity as 

 a good satisfactory crop. 



The fact to which I would allude, is, that in the year (I am 

 not able to name what year,) when the crop was pretty gener- 

 ally cut off by frost, I sold from the reclaimed white birch 

 pasture, of which I have given an account, it being hill land, 

 two hundred bushels of ears of corn for seed, at one dollar per 

 bushel, of ears. It w^ent to most parts of the county, and out 

 of the county. I recollect selling forty bushels to Mr. Dixie of 

 Worcester ; my success that year in having my corn early 

 enough to avoid destruction by frost, was to be attributed to 

 my taking great care to procure the earliest and best seed. My 

 practice has long been to gather my seed in the field in August, 

 or the first of September, before it it is generally ripe, always se- 

 lecting the earliest; and preferring to take from the stalks having 



