AMERICAN INSTITUTE. 355 



seed taken from a squash from Japan. This squash is shaped like 

 an old fashioned water melon, and about ten inches diameter and 

 twelve long^ shell like a gourd, meat white and about one and a 

 half or two inches thick, taste something like that of a green apple 

 but nicer, makes one of the best pies I ever ate made of green 

 fruit — grow just as water melons do. 



Oats — 42 lbs. per bushel, will give 80 bushels per acre. 



Barley — 51 lbs. per bushel, will giye 60 bushels per acre. 



RICE. 



An interesting paper on this subject, by R. Russell of Kilwhiss, 

 in 1855, on the culture of rice in Carolina. 



Good rice land near Savannah, is worth from $150 to $200 per 

 acre, i. e. more than twice the value of the best sugar lands on 

 the Mississippi. 



The average produce of rough rice on the Savannah swamps is 

 from 45 to 55 bushels an acre — sometimes on old rich fields 70 to 

 80 bushels are obtained. When this land becomes foul through 

 weeds, or the "volunteer rice," (self planted,) they lay it under 

 dry cultivation for a year. This is a gi-eat benefit— ^for without 

 any manure they get first a crop of oats and next of potatoes, and 

 yet the land is so renovated that the succeeding crop of rice is 

 often increased one half, and sometimes even doubled.* The oats 

 are sown in the beginning of January, the surface of the land 

 merely scratched with a hoe to cover the seed. The warmth and 

 moisture of April and May, commonly send up a very thick, tall 

 crop of the oats, which almost smothers the grass and volunteer 

 rice ; and in May the oats are harvested. Then potatoes are planted, 

 but they are waxy. 



The rice plant adapts itself to the most opposite conditions of 

 soil, moisture, kc. The same kind of rice which flourishes on the 

 flooded swamp lands, also flourishes on the upland cotton soils and 

 dry pine barrens. Rice grows from 3i to 5 feet high. 



The rice grounds are comparatively healthy for white men in 

 winter, but not so in summer and autumn, while the crops are 

 growing and ripening. It is said, with some truth, that the swamps 

 when uncultivated, were far more healtliy — undrained lands cov- 

 ered with their vegetation, for instance. The Campagna de Roma 



