CEREAL GRASSES. 37 



lin. Rye is very easy of cultivation, from being so little 

 subject to disease. No dressing with salt or vitriol is 

 required for the seed. Rye as a green crop is sown on 

 stubble land after the wheat is reaped ; and after it has 

 been consumed by the ewes and lambs, turnips are sown. 

 We have already remarked on the good qualities of 

 rye bread. Meslin bread used to be common in the 

 north of England, and was universally esteemed exceed- 

 ingly wholesome and palatable. Rye is used to feed pigs 

 and horses and also in making malt and ardent spirits, 

 but it is only second-rate for any of these purposes. 

 Rye is extensively cultivated in Holland, where it forms 

 the chief ingredient in the spirit called Hollands or 

 Geneva, the latter name being Dutch for Juniper, the 

 berries of which give the flavour to the spirit. The 

 straw may be made palatable to cattle, if chopped, steamed, 

 and mixed with linseed. Its toughness renders it desir- 

 able for thatching, and for stuffing horse-collars, etc., 

 and its applicability to straw-hat- making is well known, 

 being celebrated by the great poet of England : — 



" Sun-burnt sicklemen of August weary, 

 Come hither from the furrow and be merry ; 

 Make holiday — your rye-straw hats put on." 



The principal disease to which rye is subject is the 

 ergot, which is a fungus that attacks the seed and shoots 

 out a long black horn from the grain. During a period 

 of famine in France, the poor were driven to use bread 

 made of ergoted rye. All who ate it became ill, suffer- 

 ing more or less from dry gangrene, which in the worse 

 cases caused the limbs to rot off before death. In the 

 ' Journal of the Royal Society of Agriculture ' there is 

 an account of similar effects produced upon a family 

 at Waltisham, in Suffolk, in 1762. When the French 



