170 NOTES AND ILLUSTRATIONS. 



tain, intimates that the superiority of the Spanish and English wool is owing to the abnu- 

 dance of this grass in the hilly pastures where the sheep are kept. 



Curtis has enumerated twenty-five genera, and one hundred and twenty-three species, 

 of grasses growing in Great Britain, and has judiciously remarked, that to constitute the 

 herbage of a good meadow there must be a combination of produce, bateableness, and 

 early growth. Bateable is altogether an agricultural or provincial term, and he uses it 

 to express cattle's thriving on the food they eat. 



The best grasses of Europe have been neglected, and our indigenous ones have been, 

 in a great measure, overlooked by us. Let our scientific men, our practical men, turn 

 their attention to this and other important branches of husbandry, as yet scarcely noticed, 

 and affording inexhaustible topics for investigation, and let them be encouraged in their 

 labours by the observation of Bacon, that " Virgil got as much glory of eloquence, wit, 

 and learning, in the expressing of the observations of husbandry, as of the heroical acts of 

 jEneas." 



NOTE LL/ 



This grass produces a fine perfume, and has the same effect on tobacco as the vanilla 

 bean. It delights in a rich soil, and may be easily cultivated. It is greatly superior, in 

 its odoriferous qualities, to the anthoxantum odoratum, or sweet-scented vernal grass, the 

 only one of that kind which grows in England. Cattle are very fond of it, and it must 

 produce the most delicious milk, butter, and butchers' meat. There is, however, great 

 clanger of its total extirpation, as it is very scarce. Indeed, the same danger is to be ap- 

 prehended, and the same fatality has, no doubt, occurred in other instances. Hudson, on 

 the 6th of September, sent a boat to sound the Kills between Bergen and Staten Island, 

 and his men on their return reported, that the " Lands were as pleasant with grass and 

 flowers, and goodly trees, as ever they had seen, and very sweet smells came from them." 

 This is not now the case. The grazing of cattle, the rooting of swine, the plough, and 

 other implements of agriculture, have entirely destroyed a great number of the annual 

 grasses and plants which formerly flourished in this country. Several persons told Kalra, 

 so far back as 1748, that the loss of many odoriferous plants, with which the woods were 

 filled at the arrival of the Europeans, but which the cattle have now extirpated, might be 

 looked upon as a cause of the greater progress of the fever ; for that the great number 

 of those stroDg plants occasioned a pleasant scent to rise, in the woods, every morning 



