THE WHEAT CHOP. 83 



extirpation of weeds from his fields and hedgerows. And 

 every plant which is not productive to him as a cultivated 

 crop, must be looked upon as a weed, and in two ways an 

 enemy to him: Firstly, as must be obvious to all, weeds 

 abstract from the soil the mineral food which would other- 

 wise serve to increase his crops, and being indigenous to 

 the soil, and of a more hardy nature, they generally get 

 the best share ; and secondly, as we have seen in the fore- 

 going sketch, they offer a home, not only for the perpetu- 

 ation of those fungoid parasites so destructive to our crops, 

 and at present so mysterious in their visitations, but also 

 in some of their varieties they furnish suitable receptacles 

 for the procreative purposes of those insect scourges, whose 

 ravages we have detailed to us in the journals of each suc- 

 ceeding year. 



The Chemistry of the wheat plant, owing to its impor- 

 tance as the first of our food grains, has received more 

 attention than that of most of our other cultivated plants. 

 Numerous analyses of its organic as well as inorganic 

 constituents have been made by continental, as well as 

 by our own chemists ; all of them add greatly to our store 

 of knowledge, though some of them have a more practical 

 application than others. In the early days of agricultural 

 chemistry, the composition of the soil was thought to claim 

 our first consideration, and soil analyses were looked upon 

 as the keystones of the new system. These failed, how- 

 ever, to secure the results expected not that the chemist 

 was unable to determine the exact constituents of the 

 sample submitted to him, but because it was impossible 

 to supply him with any sample that should fairly repre- 

 sent the mass of the soil whose composition we wished to 

 have made known to us. Every one conversant with 

 farming must have noticed the variations in the soil of 

 different fields on the same farm, and frequently even of 

 different parts of the same field. A sample taken, there- 



