846 Transactions. — Botany. 



are feeding thereon, so tliat these cattle may in the shortest time be ready 

 for the market. But the operations of these graziers and farmers will 

 necessitate their growing upon their several lands very different species of 

 grasses. To the grazier permanency will be a great recommendation in the 

 grasses he selects, while to the farmer, although the grasses must be both 

 fattening and nutritious, yet he will only require them to be annuals and 

 biennials, so that they may not occupy his land more than one or two years 

 after sowing. 



But these are not all the conditions necessary in the selection and 

 sowing of grasses, it is requisite to choose those that will best suit the 

 kind of soil, its topographical situation, annual state of moisture, chemical 

 constituents, and many other circumstances. A grass may be very valuable 

 when planted on one piece of ground, and nearly worthless when planted 

 upon another. The grazier or farmer is often surprised that a grass or 

 clover he has seen extolled in books, etc., will not grow upon his land, or if 

 it manages to keep itself alive will bear but Httle herbage, and that little will 

 not fatten his live stock, or cause them to grow wool ; or a grass may be 

 very good of itself, but in the struggle for existence some more vigorous 

 grass may overgrow and kill it, as for example, the Holcus lanatus will 

 destroy the doob, or any weaker growing grass near it. Therefore it is 

 necessary that before any grass or clover is sown, these various conditions 

 and many others must be taken into account and attended to, that the best 

 results may foUow. For there is all the difference between keeping a sheep 

 to the acre, or ten, or even more, or one head of large cattle to every five 

 acres, or one or two bullocks to every acre, and to fatten them by the time 

 they are twenty-four or thirty months old. It is no use purchasing valuable 

 short-horn cattle, or Lincoln or Leicester sheep, if the pastures are not what 

 they ought to be by the grass growing vigorously and with its chemical 

 constituents properly combined, thus producing the largest amount of 

 nutritious food, for, as Mr. Bakewell said, "It is the feeding riore than the 

 breeding that tells." 



The pastures may even look green, but the stock may not thrive, and 

 upon the chemist testing the grasses his analysis may show that the 

 minerals and organic elements are not normally proportioned. But, 

 further, while one grass will fail to feed, or will not even grow, another 

 species in the same place will thrive and bear abundant herbage, and both 

 nourish and fatten stock. 



We have lately seen wonder expressed at the rye and other grasses 

 affected with the ergot fungus fSecale cornutumj and that stock fed thereon 

 suffer. This is apparently a great mystery to some, but none to the 



