PERIOD OF INTEODUCTIOX. 203 



Ryegrass does not appear to have been known in this 

 country until about the middle of the seventeenth cen- 

 tury, a period marked in the annals of agriculture by the 

 first cultivation of any of the true grasses for hay or pas- 

 ture, which is thus recorded in Dr. Plot's Oxfordshire, 

 published in 1677: " They have lately sown ray-grass, 

 or the Gramen loliaceum, by which they improve any 

 cold, sour, clay-weeping ground, for which it is best, but 

 good also for dry upland grounds, especially light, stony, 

 or sandy land, which is unfit for sainfoin. It was first 

 sown in the Chiltern parts of Oxfordshire, and since 

 brought nearer Oxford by one Eustace, an ingenious hus- 

 bandman of Islip, who, though at first laughed at, has 

 since been followed even by those very persons who 

 scorned his experiments." Mention is frequently made 

 of it in several works on rural affairs that appeared at 

 the close of the seventeenth and during the eighteenth 

 century, from which it appears to have made good pro- 

 gress in the opinion of the farming public, and to have 

 been very generally grown, either by itself or mixed with 

 clovers and other grass seeds. The repeated sowing, how- 

 ever, of ryegrass seed from the first crops by the earlier 

 growers resulted, towards the end of last century, in the 

 prevalence of a short-lived variety, afterwards termed 

 "annual ryegrass," and unfit in many cases for the laying 

 down of lands to two or more years' pasture, which na- 

 turally directed attention to the selection of a more lasting 

 variety. Accordingly, we find that this desideratum was 

 soon supplied by Mr. Pacey, of Northleach, whose perennial 

 ryegrass, as it is still called, has since become known 

 throughout the whole country. 



The successful results of Mr Pacey's careful experiments 

 soon stimulated other cultivators, each of whom dis- 

 covered, or fancied he had discovered, a variety possessing 

 new or additional merits; so that prior to the publication 



