Curt.—On Grasses and Fodder Plants. 891 
which grows a very large quantity of nutritious herbage to the acre, in rich 
land often as much as forty tons to the acre, which will feed milking cows, 
fattening bullocks or sheep, horses and other animals, or if allowed to ripen 
its seed will yield a great quantity, often ninety bushels of clean grain to 
the acre, which will grind into a white flour that is much used in India, 
California, and elsewhere. 
Sorghum halepensis is a white-seeded kind with heads that remain upright 
and do not droop; this is an excellent sort for saving for ripe corn, and 
when ground into meal its white flour is of good colour and taste, and con- 
tains those elements that mark it out as a valuable food-plant. In China 
and other parts of Asia, where it is grown, it is considered a valuable 
cereal ; and I think would be a valuable plant both for its corn, and also as 
a fodder plant, as the domestic animals will eat it green or dried. 
Sorghum saccharatum.—The several varieties of this grass that I tested 
from various parts of China, Thibet, and other parts of Asia, were more or 
less hardy at first, and the first growths contained different quantities of 
sugar in their expressed juice and in their tissues, as proved by either fer- 
menting and caleulating the distillates of aleohol, or testing them by 
chemical re-agents ; but after a few years sowing their hardiness increased, 
or they adapted their growth more to our seasons and climate, while the 
amount of sugar they developed, showed that many of them were most 
valuable fodder plants, and would rapidly fatten animals, either cut green, 
or when preserved in pits, or silos, and that the enormous quantity of 
herbage per acre they produced, would repay the trouble and labour taken 
to grow them, by the meat and milk they would produce. 
Broom Corn.—A variety of Sorghum vulgare produced by selective culture 
in America, can be grown here and furnish the broom-makers with the 
parts they require, that is the expanded panicle; both the large and dwarf 
varieties ripened seed with me, but as they are not so excellent as a fodder 
Plant as some other varieties, and although pigs, fowls, and other domestic 
animals eat the seeds, yet the other varieties are better for the meat and 
milk producer, 
A variety of Imphee, called Red Imphee or Siberian perennial, grows well 
during the hot weather, and being hardier than the other Imphee, may be 
recommended, as it gives a large quantity of fodder during the summer and 
autumn here, and will be even better further North. 
The hardy sugar-cane, developed and grown in Minesota, and called 
* Kennedy’s Amber Minesota," grows well as a fodder-plant here, and the 
quantity of saccharine in it makes it much relished by live stock, and soon 
fattens them ; while the farmers can obtain a syrup from its juice which 
will answer the purposes to which sugar is often applied, and in the warmer 
