132 .NOTES AND 



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NOTE 34. 



In strictnc53 there are but two species of.wlieat; with beards, and without 

 beards. Winter, summer, gray, duckbill, gray pollard or fuller wheat, cone 

 wheat, polonian whoat, sibf-ian spring wheat, Switzerland spring wheat, aegyp 

 tian bearded wheat, murwaary wheat, brought from Barbary, gernian spelter, 

 zecland wheat, and froment tremais, so called because it is only three months 

 in the earth, all varieties of one or the other of these species, have been in a 

 greater or less degree cultivated in England, and each has some peculiar recom- 

 mendation. I have seen lands in this state which have produced fifty bushels an 

 acre of this most excellent of the cerealia. 



In the Transactions of the Linnaean Society, it is stated, that the blight of 

 wheat, (uredo fnunenti,) in the west of England, which was attributed to an 

 insect, was owing to a fungus which had been long sown in the stem of the 

 vrheat. Sir Joseph Banks, in an excellent essay on the blight in corn, annexed 

 to Curtis' Practical Observations on the British Grasses, has embraced the same 

 opinion, and says, that the blight is occasioned by the growth of a minute para- 

 sitic fungus, or mushroom, on the leaves, stems, and glumes of the living plant ; 

 and he further states, .that it has long been admitted by farmers, though scarcely 

 credited by botanists, that wheat, in the neighbourhood of a barberry bush, 

 seldom escapes the blight; that tue village 'of Rollesby, in Norfolk, where 

 barberries abound, and wheat seldom succeeds, is called by the opprobrious 

 appellation of mildew Rollesby ; that some observing men have, of late, attri- 

 buted this very perplexing effect to the farina of the flowers of the barberry, 

 which is, in truth, yellow, and resembles, in some degree, the appearance of 

 the rust, or what is presumed to be the blight, in its early state, and that it is 

 notorious to all botanical observers, that the leaves of the barberry are very 

 subject to the attack of a yellow parasitic fungus,' larger, but otherwise much re- 

 sembling, the rust in corn. In opposition to the idea, that it is improbable that 

 these fungi are the same, it is remarked that the misletoe, the best known pa- 

 rasitic plant, delights most to grow on the apple and hawthorn, in England, 

 but that it flourishes occasionally on trees widely differing in their nature from 

 both of these ; and in the middle states of America it is most frequently found 

 on the nyssa sylvatica, or sour gum, but to the southward upon oaks. " 



An insect, called the tipula tritici, or wheat insect, has destroyed, in some 

 places in England, about one twentieth part of the produce. An insect, called 

 the ichneumon tipulie, deposites its egg in the larva, or caterpillar, of the wheat 

 fly, and this destroys it. Dr ; Darwin gravely proposes, in his Phytologia, to 

 counteract the pernicious effects of insects which produce blight, by propagation 



