540 MONTHLY JOURNAL OF AGRICULTURE. 



case would warrant such a result. We have not his invaluable " Farmers' Re- 

 gister" to refer to ; but, perhaps from the prejudice of early associations, we 

 confess to a partiality for the old and still very much the southern practice of 

 pulling and careiully curing the blades and cutting the tops, without undertaking, 

 however, to decide upon and recommend the practice on the score of actual 

 economy. It is only by thus offering adequate inducement that we can prevail 

 on some reliable farmers to establish all these facts by careful experiment, mak- 

 ing the quantity of grain the standard of reference and comparison ; and that 

 we can get to know with sufiicient accuracy how much there is of food and ma- 

 nure to be had in the whole •plant, from a given measure of land, and be thus pre- 

 pared to measure the aggregate value of all that our capital and labor produce 

 when bestowed on this crop. 



As before intimated, this is not one of the cases that admits of a premium to 

 excite competition. The object is simply to come at certain facts of plain and 

 obvious importance, the ascertainment of which requires care and zeal, and, at 

 the same time, involves a degree of pains and expense that could not fairly be 

 expected without adequate inducement. There is no need, however, of setting 

 one hundred to doing what one can do as well, and when only one can be com- 

 pensated for the trouble. 



Does any one believe that a merchant or manufacturer, interested in a matter 

 coimected with his business to the amount of the value to the farmer of any one 

 of these items, would rest until he had ascertained precisely how it bears on his 

 halance sheet ? Why, we will venture to assert that the millionaires, proprietors 

 of the great Middlesex manufactory at Lowell, can tell how much a gallon 

 more or less of oil on the gudgeons of their machinery, or one mill in the price 

 of wool, adds to or diminishes the cost of a yard of their cloth ! — And here we 

 take leave to protest against the temper evinced by a member of the New- York 

 Farmers' Club, when this question of the value of the cobs of Indian corn was 

 raised there not long since, whereupon he, according to the uncontradicted re- 

 ports of the papers, remarked, with more flippancy than discretion, that the best 

 way to determine their value was to throw, at once, the grain and the cobs to the 

 hogs for their decision ! For one we feel indebted to the author of the problem 

 for urging it on the attention of those whose province it is to illustrate all such 

 questions. But as there is a vast difference in the relative proportions of grain 

 and offal, or fodder, incidental to a given measure of corn in different latitudes^ 

 these measurements would require to be made in the South or West, as well as 

 in the North or East. Two, or, at most, three points, however, Avould answer 

 for the establishment of data to rectify and guide practice throughout the coun- 

 try. It is quite probable, for example, that no stalk of the corn of Mr. Lathrop 

 of Springfield, Massachusetts, which yielded one hundred bushels to the acre, 

 in the list given in the next chapter, was higher than Hon. John Wentwokth in 

 his stockings ; whereas that which, in Kentucky, gave Mr. Williams one hun- 

 dred and fifty-eight bushels could probably not be reached liy old Rougli and 

 Ready, with the point of his sword, seated on his war horse. 



We were informed by a correspondent in Dorset County, Maryland, in 1S2S — 

 (see American Farmer) — that he grew several acres of corn eleven feet high ; 

 and in the same journal, in 1830, there is a statement of a stalk of corn then 

 growing on the farm of Andrew Clark, of Columbus County, Pennsylvania, 

 measured by Col. Jos. Paxton in the presence of Joshua Loyd, of Ohio, and 

 David Clark, of Columbus, Pennsylvania : " Right of stalk, from the surface of 



(1110) 



