1891.] PUBLIC DOCUMENT — No. 4. 213 



per cent of purity and germinating power. Also, that a State in- 

 spector of seeds should be appointed to carry out the law, to the 

 end that all dealers in seeds shall be required to state what they 

 sell, and sell what they state. 



I move you, sir, the passage of this resolution. 



Mr. Appleton. This subject has been considered in 

 England by the chief agricultural society there, and, if I 

 remember rightly, the law has certain provisions for the 

 protection of farmers. It requires that there shall be a cer- 

 tain per cent of purity in their seed ; they recognize the 

 impossibility of getting them wholly pure, and the botanists 

 of the Royal Agricultural Society inspect all seeds that are 

 sold under a guarantee, and<give information at a fixed and 

 very reasonable rate to all agriculturists. 



Mr. Moore of Worcester. Such a law would be first 

 rate if it could be carried out, but it would shut off the 

 farmers. Suppose I should bring in a bushel of beans, and 

 want to sell them, and suppose that I have got. to guarantee 

 fifty per cent of germinating power, — would I or would 

 any person undertake to give such a guarantee ? Perhaps 

 under favorable circumstances fifty per cent would germi- 

 nate ; perhaps under other circumstances a much smaller 

 per cent would germinate. 



Mr. Sears of Worcester. I bought the past year a quan- 

 tity of what I supposed to be grass seed, and found that I 

 had bought a large quantity of wild carrot seed. It was 

 scattered over three acres, and I had to pull it all out. I 

 won't have it in my field. If you go down to the Old Colony 

 you will find fields where there is nothing but wild carrot to 

 be seen, and if we introduce it here it will spread so rapidly 

 that we shall soon find no grass growing. We find that the 

 ox-eyed daisy is spreading in the same way, and so of other 

 seeds. I have bought seed purporting to be clover seed, 

 that contained anything but clover. Of course we can more 

 readily detect adulteration in the case of larger seed ; but I 

 have found that the germinating qualities varied exceedingly. 

 As I have been somewhat in the garden business, I have had 

 a chance to test a good many of these things ; and I think it 

 would be very judicious to have something in the way of 



