No. 4.] FIELD CROPS. 325 



ignated the "best gift of God to the American people;" 

 the crop which so often stood between our forefathers and 

 starvation; the crop of which Whittier sang: — 



" Heap high the farmer's wintry hoard ! 

 Heap high the golden corn ! 

 No richer gift has Autumn poured 

 From out her lavish horn. 



" Let other lands, exulting, glean 

 The apple from the pine, 

 The orange from its glossy green, 

 The cluster from the vine ; 



" But let the good old corn adorn 

 The hills our fathers trod ; 

 Still let us, for Hi's golden corn, 

 Send up our thanks to God." 



Mangels. 



The various classes and varieties of beets, mangels, 

 sugar beets and table beets are all from the same wild 

 species, which seems to have been indigenous to the shores 

 and some of the islands of the Mediterranean. In the wild 

 form the root is small and tough. The great increase in its 

 size and succulence and the wide variety exhibited in size, 

 form, color and composition arc the results of cultivation 

 and selection. The mangel, or mangel-wurzel, and the 

 sugar beet are very closely related, the latter being only a 

 small and very saccharine variety of the class to which they 

 both belong. The beet has been cultivated more than two 

 thousand years. • 



It is impossible to present statistics showing the extent to 

 which it is cultivated in Massachusetts or the United States. 

 It is one of the leading farm crops in England, where it 

 occupied 339,000 acres in L894, standing sixth in the list of 

 cultivated crops. It has never been a very important crop 

 with us, though formerly more prominent than at the pres- 

 ent time. The more important conditions which have 

 lessened its culture among its are: first, its inferiority to 

 corn as a food producer, the corn crop, as has been shown, 



