190 CHYMISTRY APPLIED TO AGRICULTURE. 



ed under the skin, which would speedily occasion their com- 

 plete decomposition. In the second instance he causes the 

 potatoes to be pared and thrown for some hours into water 

 slightly salted. When the potatoes are completely frozen, 

 he finds them to yield, upon distillation, a spirituous liquor 

 resembling the best rum, and affording much more alcohol, 

 and that of a better quality, than can be procured from the 

 roots before freezing. 



The preservation of grains has always been an object 

 of much consideration both to governments and agricultur- 

 ists, and it is a peculiarly interesting one, because bread 

 forms so large a portion of the nourishment of Europeans, 

 and because the scarcity and high price of it have been 

 the cause or the pretext for popular discontents and insur- 

 rections. 



The art of preserving grains unchanged, besides obviating 

 this evil, presents the additional advantage to the agricultur- 

 ist of enabling him to make a good harvest compensate for 

 a bad one, by maintaining the price of bread stuff at a rate 

 Buitable alike for the consumer and the producer ; and thus 

 avoiding those periodical successions of high and low prices, 

 of abundance or scarcity, which disturb social order, and 

 give rise to excesses prejudicial to all. 



It appears that the people of the most ancient times pre- 

 Berved their grains uninjured through several years, mere- 

 ly by secluding them entirely from the action of air and 

 moisture. 



The Chinese have from time immemorial preserved their 

 grains in pits, which they call teon : these ditches are 

 either hewn out in rocks free from chinks and humidity, 

 or what is still better, they are dug in a firm, dry soil. If 

 there be any danger of humidity about the pits, they are 

 lined with straw, or wood is burned in them to harden and 

 dry the earth. The grain is not put into the pits till some 

 months after the harvest, nor till it has been well dried in 

 the sun : it is then covered over with mats made of the 

 chaff of the grain or of straw, and this again by a bed of 

 earth well beaten down, that it may not be penetrated by 

 water. 



Varro, Columella, and Pliny inform us, that the an- 

 cients preserved their grain in ditches hollowed out of 

 rocks or dug in the earth, the sides of them being lined 

 with straw, duintus Curtius relates, that the army of 

 Alexander experienced great privation upon the banks of 



