350 
On the St. Johns-Day Rye. 
introduction, and since it is so useful a fodder, why has not the 
cultivation of it been more widely diffused ? The answer is, that 
several causes have concurred to retard its progress. First, the 
slowness with which new articles of culture become known and 
adopted. For instance, it is now more than half a century since 
Dr. Lettsom introduced mangold-wurzel into England ; but it is 
only within a very few years past that its transcendent utility has 
been acknowledged, and its use become general. It was nearly 
as long before the use of swedes was established. In the next 
place, from 1823 to 1840, a period of seventeen years, the author, 
to whose use it had been principally confined, discontinued farm- 
ing, and so could not during that period contribute by his own act 
or example to diffuse its cultivation. In the next place, the grain 
of the St. John's-day rye is usually of a very poor, insignificant 
sample, and very small, and from this circumstance the seed is 
very liable to be foul, and become mixed with the obtrusive seeds 
of several Brome Grasses, Bromi, and Droke, Lolia, Arvense, and 
Temulentum, which are nearly of the same size with this rye. 
The difficulty of separating them from the corn is indeed so great, 
that on one occasion, when a neighbouring farmer had bought, 
and received, and paid for a portion of this grain for seed, he 
returned it, and solicited that he might have his money returned, 
under the belief that he had been supplied with only the tailing 
corn : it was, however, as clean as any which with much care had 
been prepared to be sown on the author's farm. 
The gentleman to whom the author made over his stock of the 
St. John s-day rye in 1823, after two years' trial, threw it aside, 
having imbibed and avowed the persuasion that the rye degene- 
rated into droke and lop grasses, Lolium temulentum, and L. 
arvense, Bromus secalinus, arvensis, mollis, &c. Touching this 
belief, when we see so talented a person as the author of the 
' Vestiges of Creation ' gravely quote, without reprobation, the 
statement of some German writer, whom he does not name,* that 
oats sown in the spring, and depastured through the summer and 
autumn, will in the succeeding spring produce a crop of rye, we 
ought not to treat with contempt a similar opinion held by any 
practical farmer. The wisest and most philosophic person f with 
whom the author ever had the honour and happiness to be ac- 
quainted, early in the author's life, inculcated the precept, never 
to pronounce the statement of any physical phenomenon to be 
• The author has not had an opportunity of seeing the Vindication of 
that work, in which the German writer is said to be named. But Chambers's 
Miscellany, article " Curiosities of Vegetation," title " Transmutation of 
Plants," quotes Dr. Weissenborn, who states that oats sown in the latter 
end of June, and twice mown in the same summer, produce a crop of 
rye from the same crowns in the following summer. 
•|- The Rev. Joseph Townsend, rector of Pewsey, Wilts. 
