754 
The Cuiiipositiuti, of some of the 
liked for food are almost always allowed to run to seed. The 
best illustration of this is the case of crested dogstail. The 
grasses amongst which it grows may be carefully eaten down, 
while every plant of dogstail has been allowed to send up its 
flowering stalk. In this way some pastures appear in autumn 
to be composed entirely of this grass, whereas, as far as the 
stock is concerned, the pasture would have been better had it 
not been there. 
In the same way, Yorkshire fog is rejected by stock; but, as 
this grass produces a considerable amount of foliage, it always 
Becures the rejection of some good grasses growing beside it. 
Even a few plants of this grass are consequently undesirable in 
a pasture, not only on their own account, but because they pre- 
vent the utilisation of the good grasses in their immediate 
neighbourhood. 
Unlike the bents of the dogstail, which are scattered gene- 
rallv over the pastures, the bents of the Yorkshire fog with their 
great radical leaves occur in patches, and these occasionally of 
great extent. In some meadows the half of the area is next to 
useless to the summer stock because of the prevalence of this 
grass. This very evil has strangely come to be looked upon by 
many as something of a virtue. Again and again when I have 
pointed to the serious detriment to the pasture from the pre- 
sence of so much Holcus, I have been assured of its great value, 
because the whole of it would be consumed by the lean stock 
which would be placed on the field in the late autumn. It is 
of course true that hungry animals are compelled to eat this 
grass when there is nothing else to be had ; but it is forgotten, 
first, that the dry bents have lost their seeds, which have fallen 
on the ground to still further increase the number of these 
objectionable plants, and still more that the leaves and stalks 
have been nearly emptied of the available food they possessed 
by its having been transferred to the seeds, so that the valued 
pasture which the starving animals are driven to consume, so far 
as it consists of Yorkshire fog, supplies them with scarcely any 
nutriment. One cannot realise the great loss that yearly befalls 
the farmer from the presence, to so great an extent, of this grass, 
at first rejected by stock and then next to valueless when the 
stock are compelled to eat it. Where it is permitted to remain 
in a meadow, it would be much better to cut the patches when 
the grass conies into flower, and make it into hay. At the 
flowering period the tissues arc full of food — protoplasm and 
starch — and the hay if eaten by stock would afford them some 
nourishment. But it must be remembered that it is no more 
palatable to stock in the form of hay than in its green state. A 
