PASTURE GRASSES. 



While there are over two hundred varieties of grasses 

 cultivated in England for the use of domestic animals, in 

 the occupied territory embraced within the United States 

 there are not more than twenty five, although there is a 

 much greater diversity of soils, surface configuration, climate 

 and latitude. The grasses constituting our meadows are 

 nearly all derived from the eastern continent, where the 

 abundance of the rich pasture lands teem with a great va- 

 riety of nutritious herbage. All the cereals oats, rye, 

 wheat and barley, are indigenous to the old world. Indian 

 corn is the greatest and almost the only valuable cereal con- 

 tributed by the new world to the old. The great prairies 

 east and west of the Mississippi abound in a charming and 

 luxuriant vegetation, but the supply of food which they 

 afford for the herds grazing upon them, in comparison to 

 the overwhelming quantity of worthless herbage, is very 

 scanty. Exactly the reverse is the condition of the pastures 

 of the eastern hemisphere, where almost every plant that 

 springs from the surface of the earth is rich in nutritive 

 elements. The situation of Tennessee being midway be- 

 tween the East and the West, partakes of both sections. 

 We have in the State many thousands of acres of wild lands, 

 situated not only on the mountain plateau, but on the high- 

 lands of the river lands, called with us " Barrens." These 

 Barrens are covered with a dense growth of timber, and in 

 some sections, where they have not been burned off, with 



