326 OBSERVATIONS ON VEGETABLES. 



BEANS SOWN BY BIRDS. Many horse-beans sprang up in 

 my field-walks in the autumn, and are now grown to a con- 

 siderable height. As the Ewel was in beans last summer, it is 

 most likely that these seeds came from thence ; but then the 

 distance is too considerable for them to have been conveyed 

 by mice. It is most probable, therefore, that they were 

 brought by birds, and, in particular, by jays and pies, who 

 seem to have hid them among the grass and moss, and then 

 to have forgotten where they had stowed them. Some peas 

 are growing also in the same situation, and probably under 

 the same circumstances. 



CUCUMBERS SET BY BEES. If bees, who are much the 

 best setters of cucumbers, do not happen to take kindly to the 

 frames, the best way is to tempt them by a little honey, put 

 on the male and female bloom. When they are once induced 

 to haunt the frames, they set all the fruit, and will hover with 

 impatience round the lights in a morning, till the glasses are 

 opened. Probatum est. 



WHEAT. A notion has always obtained, that, in England, 

 hot summers are productive of fine crops of wheat ; yet in the 

 years 1780 and 1781, though the heat was intense, the wheat 

 was much mildewed, and the crop light. Does not severe 

 heat, while the straw is milky, occasion its juices to exude, 

 which being extravasated, occasion spots, discolour the stems 

 and blades, and injure the health of the plants ? 



TRUFFLES. August. A truffle-hunter called on us, having 

 in his pocket several large truffles found in this neighbourhood. 

 He says, these roots are not to be found in deep woods, but in 

 narrow hedge-rows and the skirts of coppices. Some truffles, 

 he informed us, lie two feet within the earth, and some quite 

 on the surface ; the latter, he added, have little or no smell, and 

 are not so easily discovered by the dogs as those that lie 

 deeper. Half-a-crown a pound was the price which he asked 

 for this commodity. 



Truffles never abound in wet winters and springs. They 

 are in season, in different situations, at least nine months in the 

 rear. * 



(mi/osotis scorpioides,) the scorpion's grass, (jaminivm purpureum, ) and 

 the corn spurrey, (spergula arvensis.) The earth thus experimented 



upon was taken from the lands of Colbin EC. 



* This singular vegetable belongs to the class of cryptogamic plants, 

 the tuber cibarum genus of Linnaeus : it grows entirely under ground* 

 having neither root, stem, nor leaf, and of a black colour, strongly 

 scented, of a globular shape, growing to the size of a large duck's egg, 



