70 CLINTON'S INTRODUCTORY DISCOURSE- 



Hitherto it has been discovered nowhere else except, as I have been 

 informed, in North America."* 



Adequate and satisfactory notices of our hubandry would occupy too 

 much time. Our attention ought to be drawn to supplies of the best 

 and most powerful manures. As gypsum has no influence in the atmos- 

 phere of the sea, it is a great desideratum to find a substitute equally 

 efficient for the Atlantic parts of the state. Fish, peat, sea weed, street 

 dirt, calcined pyrites, lime, ashes, and marl, have been all recommended, 

 and some of them have been tried with great success. The dyking of 

 salt meadows and marshes, and thereby creating excellent land for tillage 

 and grass, and the irrigation of lands, would be very advantageous, and 

 they have not been practised with us except in a few solitary cases. 

 Several plans for a rotation of crops have been proposed, but have not 

 been attended to in a manner due to their importance. The failure of 

 wood not only requires some beneficial system for replenishing our 

 forests, but for accommodating the farmer with substantial fences: 

 hedges of white thorn or hawthorn may answer a valuable purpose, and 

 it is believed that there are three species with us, two native and one 

 imported from Great Britain. Of all the culmiferous plants, wheat con- 

 tains the heaviest grain, and it is certainly the most important of the 

 cerealia : it is our great staple commodity, and the utmost care ought 

 to be taken in perfecting and protecting it against the injuries which it 

 receives from various sources. The selection of the best kind for seed 

 is a great object, there being several species, red, white, yellow, bald, 

 bearded, summer, and winter. It is obnoxious to injury from cockle, 

 drips, sorrel, commixture of rye, smut, the weavil, the hessian fly, blast, 

 and mildew. The cause of mildew is unknown; the blast sometimes 



* Acerbi'a Travels through Sweden, &c. vol. 1. p. 340. 



