The Locust. 



as you think you can conveniently sow before night; put 

 it into a tub or some vessel, sufficient to hold the seed, with 

 water five or six times as much in measure as the seed ; then 

 take water at full boil out of your copper or other boiling 

 vessel, pour it upon the seed ; give the seed a stir up amongst 

 the water, cover over the top of the vessel close, and there let 

 the seed remain for an hour or so. Then take off the cover of 

 the vessel ; and raise up some of the seed by a ladle, or some 

 such thing, and look at your seed, some of which you will 

 find swelled to nearly double their former size, and some of 

 them hardly augmented at all in size. Another hour, or 

 perhaps less (and you ought to look frequently at them), 

 will have made all the seeds swell, except a small part 

 perhaps, and those will not grow at all. Then pour the 

 seed, water and all, into a fine sieve, which will let the 

 water through and keep the seed back, have some dry sand 

 ready with a hole made in the middle of the heap, to put 

 your seeds into, and then mix up the whole heap of 

 sand with the seeds, about three gallons of sand to one gal- 

 lon of seed. 



385. Your beds are already prepared, and now you scatter 

 the seed over them along with the sand, in the manner de- 

 scribed in the case of the Ash, Do not sow too thickly ; if you 

 do, many of the plants will be destroyed by the others,and will 

 be very weak and not fit to plant out the first year at least. If 

 sowed thinly, and if the ground be good, and the beds kept 

 clean, yoiu' plants will be four feet high by the month of 

 October, quite fit to go into plantations out of the seed bed. 

 My plants are always sold from the seed bed, and a very 

 large part of them are fit to go into plantations at once; 

 but this cannot be the case, if the plants be sowed thickly. 



386. I have never sowed Locusts till the month of April, 



