202 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. 



easy and natural for man to speak the truth, so it is natural for 

 the fields to produce grass ; the thistles and weeds come only by 

 neglect. If any one wishes to know how to eradicate daisies 

 and John's-wort from his meadows, we say to him emphatically 

 top-dress them richly with good compost, and if the grasses do 

 not get the start and choke out the vile interlopers, then our 

 experience and observation have not been extensive enough to 

 form a general principle. We have seen fields, and must con- 

 fess to having owned them, so white with daisies that a passen- 

 ger on the cars supposed they were luxuriant with an early crop 

 of buckwheat ; and these same meadows, by the simple process 

 of top-dressing, have exchanged their pale-faced look for one of 

 deepest green. Whether nature spontaneously produces good 

 or evil, grass or weeds, we leave for the metaphysicians and 

 theorists to speculate upon ; but this much we know practically : 

 that if land is well cultivated, where weeds abounded grass does 

 much more abound. 



It is not a little singular to notice in this connection that the 

 sowing of grass seed is a very modern practice, and America 

 has the honor of discovering that the natural grasses may be 

 improved and the crop of hay greatly increased by carefully 

 collecting and sowing the seeds. When our fathers left England 

 in 1620, red clover was unknown there, as a distinct crop ; and 

 it was more than a century after this that the English began 

 sowing the chaff and seed collected from their barn floors and 

 around their haystacks. In 1769 the London Society for the 

 Encouragement of Arts offered premiums for the collection of 

 seeds of the wild grasses and experiments in the culture and 

 comparative value of the natural herbage of the island. The 

 mildness of the English climate allowed the farmers of that 

 country to rely upon the native products of the soil for the sus- 

 tenance of their stock ; but the rigors of our New England 

 winters soon compelled our fathers to resort to more artificial 

 resources for forage. Indeed, we read in the early history 

 of Plymouth and Massachusetts colonies, of whole herds of cattle 

 dying from starvation and exposure, ere our fathers had learned 

 the necessity of barns and the value of good hay. The Puri- 

 tans were very pure and noble ; but if we should treat our 

 cattle as stock was treated in the first century of our colonial 

 history, Mr. Burgh would expose us in the " New York Tribune" 



