No. 11. 



TJie ''Cause" and '' Remedy r 



351 



For the Farmers' Cabinet. 



The "Cause" and "liemedy." 



Mr. Editor, — I consider the country in- 

 debted to such men as C(j1. Smith and Mr. 

 James Govven, for their very valuable and in- 

 teresting essays on the cause and remedy of 

 blight in wheat, and lock upon the agricul- 

 tural periodical press as legitimately engaged 

 while recording the views and opinions of 

 others, presuming not to dictate what ought 

 to be received, and what rejected, in our ag- 

 ricultural creed. I pray you, therefore, con- 

 tinue to give combatants a clear stage ; de- 

 pend upon it nothing but good can come of 

 such agitation: I therefore say with O'Con- 

 nel, agilate, agitate ! 



In this spirit, therefore, I offer a few com- 

 ments on Mr. Gowen's article on this subject, 

 as contained in my copy of the Germantown 

 Telegraph; and lie must excuse me, if I en- 

 deavour to show that he has not, in this in- 

 stance, stated the question and argued the 

 subject with his accustomed fairness and in- 

 genuousness: but [ may be mistaken, and if 

 so, I beg that he will take the trouble to show 

 me in what I have erred. He is quite at 

 liberty to make his view of the case as clear 

 as possible, but I do not consider that this 

 should be done by darkening counsel, even 

 although he have to contend with one of Phi- 

 ladelphia's acutest lawyers: this he may con- 

 sider a grave charge, but I cannot help con- 

 sidering the matter in this light, and I will 

 tell you why. He informs us that the drill 

 system is going out in England, because it 

 has been found that to keep the crop clean 

 from weeds and exposed to the sun's rays, is 

 the way to engender the blight, and he cites 

 Tull's work on Husbandry, published by Cob- 

 belt, in proof of the assertion. Now, I had not 

 heard that such was the fact, and began to 

 re-examine his extracts, which certainly tend 

 to that point; and yet I knew that I had not 

 seen any thing like this in Tull's own book 

 — in a minute or two, however, I perceived 

 that what he had been quoting was from Cob- 

 betl, and not from Tull, which makes just all 

 the difference in the world ! The drill sys- 

 tem abandoned, indeed! and Tull made "to 

 work hard to defend his own system from 

 being obnoxious to blight!" It must bo a 

 different sort of " evidence" to prevent the 

 resorting to drill husbandry or " cny thing 

 approaching to it" to escape blight or rust 

 ia wheat, much as Mr. Gowen " trusts" wdl 

 be the ease. 



But I leave Col. Smith to fight his own 

 battle, and while he is buckling on his ar- 

 mour, I will collect from Tull's own account, 

 what he actually does say on the drill hus- 

 bandry. The extracts will be taken promis- 

 cuously, from the 1st edition of Tiill's book, 



1733 ; the object being, to show that he had 

 the fullest confidence in the truth of his prac- 

 tice and the immense advantage of carrying 

 it out — far enough removed from the charge 

 of " working hard to defend his system." 



He began to make his drills a foot apart, and 

 to keep them clean by hand-hoeing, Qp. 50,) 

 and in this way he brought as good a crop of 

 wheat on barley stubble as that sown broad- 

 cast on summer fallows, while that sown on 

 summer fallow broad-cast entirely failed in 

 the same field ; and while one part was fal- 

 lowed, dunged, and sown broad-cast, and the 

 other drilled and hand-hoed without dung, 

 the drilled was not only the best crop, but 

 the whole piece being fallowed the next year 

 and sown alike, the hoed part produced so 

 much belter a crop of wheat than the dunged 

 part, that a stranger might have mistaken 

 the part which had been hoed for the part 

 dunged. " Scarce any land is so unfit and ill- 

 prepared for wheat, as that where the natural 

 grass abounds; weeds may be dealt with (re- 

 moved) when they rise amongst drilled wheat, 

 but it is impossible to extract grass from the 

 rows: one bunch of natural grass transplanted 

 by the plough into a treble row of drilled 

 wheat, will destroy almost a yard of it. After 

 a crop of wheat has been carried, I have ob- 

 served the stubble as thick and strong on 4 

 or 5 inch intervals as on those of 18, but 

 when the rows were so near as to appear like 

 one single row, the stubble was smaller and 

 weaker. If a square yard of sown wheat be 

 marked off, and the plants counted in the 

 spring, it will be found that nine-tenths of 

 the number will be missing at harvest. I 

 have never found more than forty ears from 

 a single drilled wheat plant in my fields, but 

 I have numbered 109 grains in one ear of my 

 hoed cone-wheat, and one ear of my drilled 

 Lammas wheat has measured eight inches in 

 length, which is double that of sown wheat; 

 and there is no year when one ear of my hoed 

 crop does not more than weigh two of the 

 sown ears, taking a whole sheaf together. 

 Seed cone-wheat, coming all out of the same 

 heap, and planted at the same time and on 

 the same land, the wheat which was sown 

 (broad-cast) produced grains so small, and 

 that which was drilled so very large, that no 

 one would believe them to be the same 

 wheat; every grain of the drilled weighed 

 two of the sown, and there was twice the 

 chaff in an equal weight of the sown. By 

 drilling, the crop enjoys all the earth, and at 

 harvest there remains nothing but a space of 

 empty mould in the middle of the intervals. 

 I have often Vv-eighed the produce of the same 

 ground of all sorts of sown wheat, but never 

 found any of the sown equal to the best of 

 my drilled; a third successive crop of my 

 drilled wheat, without fallow or dung, has 



