139 



NEGAL, were well acquainted with florin, that tbey charged 

 a higher price for this than for common hay, and that it 

 was the custom to buy it for sick cattle, long antecedent 

 to the recent notice taken of it. 



I have often lamented that my efforts to introduce florin 

 culture into those parts of the British Isles whence the 

 Aboriginal Celts had been expelled by the Saxons, 

 had always failed, and that I had completely succeeded in 

 England but in one instance; — even here my fair and 

 noble pupil was herself a North Briton. 



England seems a sort of non-conductor, and stops 

 the passage of florin to those countries that are desirous to 

 cultivate this valuable grass : the Danes would have been 

 deprived of the benefits for which they are now so grate- 

 ful, had they not contrived to obtain it through another 

 channel, and florin found its way to my imperial pupil the 

 Archduke, not through England but Denmark. ^ 



I myself have been unable to procure attention to the 

 subject, or a passage for my instructions, through the 

 channels of office most interested in the growing prospe- 

 rity of the important colony of Newfoundland, where 

 the soil and climate are admirably adapted to this hardy 

 grass, and where hay now sells at twenty pounds per ton. 



The prejudice of the English against florin may in some 

 sort be accounted for, by the perpetual intrusion upon 

 them of an inferior variety, the agrostis vulgaris, hard to 

 distinguish from the true stolonifera : happily, the former 

 is not able to sustain colder climates, and thus in Ire- 

 land, Scotland, and Denmark, we escape from it. 



I have shewn 4hat the writers, both agricultural and bo- 

 tanical, of the seventeenth century, had taken such notice 

 of the agrostis stolonifera, as might have induced their 

 successors to form good expectations from it, or at least to 

 pay it some attention; but I was quite mistaken, for nothing 



