194 TILLERS OF THE GROUND CHAP. 



eighteenth, the farmers had been getting more and 

 more convinced, that, absurd as the suggestion may 

 seem at first sight, the common barberry bush had 

 something to do with blight. " It has long been 

 admitted by farmers," Banks says, " though scarcely 

 credited by botanists, that wheat in the neighbour- 

 hood of a barberry bush seldom escapes the blight. 

 The village of Rollesby in Norfolk, where barberries 

 abound and wheat seldom succeeds, is called by the 

 opprobrious appellation of Mildew Rollesby." 



Another example which he might have given 

 was that some fifty years earlier, in 1755, the 

 farmers of Massachusetts were so convinced of the 

 connection between barberry and rust that they 

 succeeded in getting a law passed to order the 

 rooting up of the barberry bushes, because of their 

 bad effect in occasioning the " Blasting of Wheat 

 and other English Grain." 



The difficulty was, however, that when asked 

 why they thought that barberries produced mildew, 

 the farmers could only reply feebly that barberry 

 pollen was yellow, and rust was yellow to begin 

 with, and perhaps it was the yellow barberry 

 pollen that fell on the wheat and made the rust ! 

 It was much the same story as that of Mohammed 

 and the date-palms over again. Nobody could give 

 Mohammed any intelligible reason why branches of 

 wild dates should be hung over the date trees in 



