APPENDIX. 445 



best of his sort of wheat, an average of " fifty-five ears 

 per plant, with three oz. of grain of fair quality 

 perhaps sixty-three Ibs. per bushel " (p. 10). This 

 corresponded to ninety bushels per acre that is, his 

 result was very similar to those obtained at the Tom- 

 blaine and Capelle agricultural stations by Grandeau 

 and F. Dessprez, whose work seems not to have been 

 known to Sir A. Cotton. True, Sir A. Cotton's ex- 

 periments were not conducted, or rather were not 

 reported, in a thoroughly scientific way. But the 

 more desirable it would have been, either to contradict 

 or to confirm his statements by experiments carefully 

 conducted at some experimental agricultural station. 

 Unfortunately, so far as I know, no such experiments 

 have yet been made, and the possibility of profitably 

 increasing the wheat crop by the means indicated by 

 Sir A. Cotton has still to be tested in a scientific 

 spirit. 



0. REPLANTED WHEAT. 



A few words on this method which now claims the 

 attention of the experimental stations may perhaps 

 not be useless. 



In Japan, rice is always treated in this way. It is 

 treated as our gardeners treat lettuce and cabbage 

 that is, it is let first to germinate ; then it is sown in 

 special warm corners, well inundated with water and 

 protected from the birds by strings drawn over the 

 ground. Thirty-five to fifty-five days later, the young 

 plants, now fully developed and possessed of a thick 

 network of rootlets, are replanted in the open ground. 

 In this way the Japanese obtain from twenty to thirty- 

 two bushels of dressed rice to the acre in the poor 

 provinces, forty bushels in the better ones, and from 



