Report on the Diseases of Wheat. 



19 



I would wish to invite agriculturists to make enquiry in their 

 several districts^, whether the ergot does not sometimes prevail to 

 an extent sufficient to induce a belief that it may be injurious to 

 the health of the poorer classes, whose food is little varied, and 

 who might thus be subjected to whatever evil influence a certain 

 admixture of the ergot in their flour may be capable of producing. 

 It may also be suggested to such medical men as have opportuni- 

 ties of witnessing those disorders to which the poor are more par- 

 ticularly liable, and which are generally ascribed to poverty of 

 diet, whether these complaints may not sometimes be induced or 

 fostered by the presence of this deleterious ingredient in the flour. 

 Tessier states, that some humane proprietors in those districts of 

 France where the gangrenous epidemic was prevalent, were in the 

 habit of furnishing their labourers with rye that had been picked 

 free from ergot, in exchange for any infected samples they might 

 themselves have grown ; and that after they had adopted this prac- 

 tice, their labourers were no longer attacked by the epidemic. 



Section X. — On the prevention of the Ergot. 



As the ergot is not known to prevail to an injurious extent in 

 any other corn than rye, nothing has been said of the mode of 

 preventing it in wheat. In rye, it is said to prevail most in wet 

 and stiff land ; and draining has been consequently suggested, 

 as the obvious mode of diminishing the evil. The direct ex- 

 periments which have been made with this view seem to have 

 been sufficiently conclusive ; and to have proved that more seeds 

 become ergoted in proportion as the plants are kept wet at the 

 roots, and grown in a clay soil. Perhaps it might be worth while 

 to cultivate rye on this principle, for the sake of supplying the 

 demand for ergot. 



Section XI. — On the Ear-cockle, Purples, or Peppercorn. 

 {Vibrio Tritici.) 



It is now just a century since Needham first made known an 

 extraordinary fact concerning the blighted grains found in the 

 ears of wheat infected by a disease known under the name of the 

 ear-cockle, purples, or, as I find it called in this part of Suffolk, 

 the peppercorn. The grains which are thus infected turn dark 

 green at first, and ultimately nearly black ; and they become 

 rounded, somewhat resembling a small peppercorn, but with one 

 or more deep furrows on their surface. The husks of the chaff 

 spread open, and the awns are twisted, by which means the in- 

 fected ears are readily observable among the standing corn. 

 Upon opening the blighted grains, they are found to be filled 

 with a moist white cottony substance ; but to contain no flour. 



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