272 



THE SOUTHERN PLANTER. 



and thinking that his opponents had the 

 advantage simpiy because skilled in the 

 use of the pen, he resolved to prove be- 

 yond all controversy, by ocular and prac- 

 tical demonstration, that wheat would turn 

 to chess. 



He took three bushels of wheat (we be- 

 lieve this was the quantity, but it is imma- 

 terial,) and looked it all over, grain by 

 grain, picking out all the chess. When he 

 had finished, he was satisfied that there 

 was not a grain of chess in the whole three 

 bushels. Now, then, thought he, I shall 

 have them; if I get ehtss from this wheat, 

 it won't do for them to tell me that I sowed 

 chess with the wheat; and he had no doubt 

 that, as usual, he should have "lots of 

 chess." The wheat was sown ; and the 

 result was, that while there was an abun- 

 dance of chess in the wheat cleaned in the 

 ordinary way, there was not a single ear of 

 chess on the land sown with the clear wheat. 

 This experiment, which Mr. J. made in or- 

 der to convince the theorists that wheat 

 would turn to chess, had the effect of con- 

 vincing him that he was in error, and that 

 the great cause of chess in wheat must be 

 ascribed to sowing chess with the seed 

 wheat. 



Once satisfied that wheat would not turn 

 to chess, Mr. J. resolved to sow no more 

 of it; and he hit upon a plan of clean- 

 ing seed wheat which took out every grain 

 of chess. The method is simply this: after 

 the wheat has been cleaned in the ordinary 

 way, by running it through a fanning mill, 

 take the riddles out of the fanning mill, 

 leaving the screen in; take off the rod 

 that shakes the riddles and screen ; pour 

 the wheat slowly into the hooper with a 

 basket or half bushel, turn the mill a little 

 quicker than for ordinary cleaning, and 

 every grain of chess will be blown out, un- 

 less where three seeds stick together, which 

 is sometimes the case with lop seeds. Two 

 men will clean from ten to fifteen bushels 

 per hour. If the wheat is light, say weigh- 

 ing from fifty to fifty-five pounds per bush- 

 el, considerale wheat will be blown away 

 with the chess ; but where good Genesee 

 wheat is raised, as in this section, weighing 

 from sixty to sixty-four pounds per bushel, 

 little or no wheat will be blown out. In 

 some cases it is better to raise the hind end 

 of the fanning mill about two inches from 

 the floor. More wind can be given and 

 not blow away the wheat. 



Since Mr. Johnston adopted this method 

 of cleaning his seed wheat, he has not 

 raised a "wine-glass full of chess in more 

 than twenty years." — [Genesee Farmer. 



CYCLES OF COLiTanD HOT 

 W^IATHER. 



It is somewhat remarkable that, though 

 the historic period is several thousands of 

 years old, comparatively little is known of 

 the science of meteorology. One would 

 have thought that one of tbe first subjects 

 to which the attention of inquirers would 

 be directed, would have been to the causes 

 of storms, the fluctuations of hot and cold 

 years, and the laws generally which gov- 

 erned the weather. But, with the excep- 

 tion of a few popular signs, to which little 

 or no additions have been made since the 

 time of Virgil, we know almost nothing on 

 the subject so universally interesting. A 

 few farmers, shepherds, or sailors, in the 

 course of a long life, have obtained, by a 

 close observation of nature, some in'sight 

 into the laws of the weather, and have ori- 

 ginated these popular signs; but being un- 

 lettered men, most of their knowledge has 

 perished with them, so that each genera- 

 tion has had to begin over again the acqui- 

 sition of the necessary facts. It is only 

 within the few last years that science has 

 taken up the subject seriously. Even yet 

 the paucity of data is so great, that only an 

 approximation has been made to a true 

 theory of the weather. 



One of the few things which may be re- 

 garded as established, is that cold and warm 

 seasons come in regularly recurring cycles. 

 It was not until A. D. 1700, that the obser- 

 vations began to be made on which this 

 conclusion is founded; and . until A. D. 

 1750 these were loosely conducted, the 

 thermometer not coming into general use 

 before. Noah Webster, LL. D., so long 

 ago as A. D. 1792, published a series of 

 tables on the weather, in which he gave 

 the comparative temperature of each year 

 for a century preceding. From these ta- 

 bles it appears that there v;as a general 

 tendency to extreme seasons from the sixth 

 to the tenth year of every decade, and es- 

 pecially every alternate decade. Since 

 that publication, more accurate observa- 

 tions, extending over a large portion of the 

 interval, have confirmed his opinion. The 

 first five years of every decade have gene- 

 rally had a mean temperature higher than 



