782 
carbonaceous substance. So if we feed a 
horse corn and nothing but com he will get 
very fat. and still be able to do some work, and 
a hog will do very well indeed when fed on 
oats or barley, but he won’t get very fat, at 
least, not for a long time. But when com is 
fed, most of its substance goes to make fat, 
and little is left to furnish material for build¬ 
ing up the bony structure, the organs of di¬ 
gestion and respiration and the other fleshy 
substance of the l>ody. But the fat through 
the entire body is contained in vary small 
celLs the walls of which are not fatty, but 
fleshy substances, and these are thick or thin 
according to the food furnished, thin when 
the food is corn or carbonaceous and thick 
when it is nitrogenous. 
A very fat cor.i-fed hog is little more than 
a ball of lard and grease. Its vital organs 
have be n reduced in size, its blood in quantity 
and the juices of the body crowded out to give 
place to cells containing fat, the walls of 
which are so thin and tender an ordinary 
strip of pork, cut from such an animal, will 
not hold together, unless supported by the 
skin. When the fat is fried or boiled the oil 
escapes and nothing is left but a mere scrap, 
and when the lean is cooked in any way, the 
meat is found dry, tasteless, hard and tough. 
But under a nitrogenous diet the entire bony 
and lean parts are fully developed, the blood 
is strong nnd rich, the juices of the body 
abundant, the cells have thick walls, the fat 
has some strength and fiber in it, and may be 
cut in small Btrips and used for larding game 
and lean meats. When boiled the fat shrinks 
some, but not much, in the pot; when fried, 
two-thirds of the substance remains after the 
oil is out; and when the lean is boiled, fried or 
roasted, the meat is tender, juicy and sweet. 
A diet of com produces the extreme on the 
one side, and a meat diet, such as is afforded 
by milk and flesh food, on the other—and thus 
pork flesh is always good or bad, according to 
the amount of nitrogenous or carbonaceous 
food given. 
But it is true that the fat of hogs fed on a 
diet largely nitrogenous, is softer under a 
medium temperature than if the food had been 
of an opposite character, but nevertheless the 
facts remain of less shrinkage in cooking and 
more sweetness and flavor. Tn times past when 
the house lights were chiefly furnished by tal¬ 
low candles, those who could, chained the tal¬ 
low to make these from grass-fed beeves, be¬ 
cause the tallow would make candles which 
would not ru i; whereas that taken from corn- 
fattened cattle, required the addition of alum 
or some other similar substance, hi harden it. 
But the tallow of grass-fed beeves is not only 
harder, but the fat is harder too, and shrinks 
less in cooking; while the flesh is juicier and 
sweeter. How a grass diet fa vorubly affects 
the sweetness of the fat and juiciness of the 
lean is well illustrated in the meat of the 
buffalo; and beeves fed on distillery slop, that 
is, on com after the starchy portion has been 
abstracted, make juicier and sweeter beef than 
where the diet is whole com chiefly; but the 
fat is softer aud higher-colored. 
Though popular ideas have not been cor¬ 
rected in respect to the value of fat as an 
article of diet, popular tastes have, and now 
when most of us buy a steak from a butcher, 
we say when the carcass is a fat one, “Oh, 
don’t give me so much tallow.” Fifty years 
ago, everybody wanted as much fat on their 
roasts and steaks as possible, and buyers 
would have been indignant had butchers cut 
away the fat the former are now so anxious 
to get rid of. Fifty years since or earlier, the 
price of tallow was something near that of 
lean meat; now it is a great deal less, that 
difference in price measuring, in some sense, 
the extent to which fat has been laid upon 
butchers’ stock, at the expense of com. 
And now we come to the summing up of the 
whole matter. Within .50 years, and since the 
settlement of the West and the increase in the 
production of the cereals, and notably Indian 
com, the food material for the making of fat 
has increased out of all proportion to that class 
of vegetation which makes hone, flesh aud 
muscle; and without becoming justly sensible 
of the fact, we have gone astray u. putting on 
fat at the expense of lean, and to the serious 
damage, not only of the health and constitu¬ 
tion of the animals, but to the lessening of the 
value of the meat, in the case of butchers’ 
stock, aud destroying the healt h of such of our 
stock as are used for breeding and work. The 
consequences are, dear beef and pork and cheap 
tallow aud grease, if not lard, and the appear¬ 
ance of a new class of diseases in farm stock of 
all kinds. It was a natural thing, of course, 
that after long centuries of feeding, during 
which the most costly and difficult thing to ■ 
get was fat, when we suddenly became pos- 1 
sessed of the material to furnish it at low cost,, 1 
we should make use of it in an extravagant 1 
way, and that the result should be as we see; 1 
but now that the mistake has been forced on ’ 
our attention in a hundred ways, the correc- c 
tion of abuse will come in due time, and just ' 
as a matter of course. c 
And hence we hear of more grass, roots, i 
vegetables and milk for hogs, and barley, oats 
and peas in place of Indian com; and for sheep 
and neat cattle. Winter pasture which is 
everywhere easy to be made on all the Blue 
Grass soils south of 40 degrees. Of course, the 
return to the medium between the two systems 
Mill be slow, and com Mill alM’ays hold a 
prominent place as the chief and leading grain 
in fattening butchers’ stock; but it will soon 
come to be recognized that for breeding stock 
and for young animals the less com they have 
the better, where a vigorous constitution, 
sound heft 1th, prepotency aud long life are 
sought. 
KAYS. 
) - 
If you have a Calla Lily that is in bad 
order, shake it out of its pot and repot it into 
[ as small a pot as you can conveniently get it 
> into, using lots of clean drainage, and a soil of 
little pieces of old sods out of which you have 
shaken the loose earth, with some sharp sand 
added, something through which water will 
percolate as freely as through a sieve. When 
this pot is filled with roots you should shift 
into a larger size and use richer soil, but al- 
M r ays an open one. 
* * 
In Shaw’s Gardens at St. Louis, the other 
day, I observed a “ Collection of Bible Plants ” 
in a plot out-of-doors near a large conservatory. 
Most of them were growing in pots, but set 
outside for the Summer. They were lalieled 
as follows: 
Almond Tree—Amygdalis communis; Ecel. 
xii., 5. 
Apples of Gold—Citrus medica: Prov. 
xxv., 11. 
Bay Tree—Lauras nobilis; Psabn xxxvii., 
35. 
Box Tree — Buxus sempervirens; Isaiah, 
xli., 19. 
Camphor Tree—Lauras camphora; Rev., 
xviii., 13. 
Cedar of Lebanon—Cedrus Libani; Psalm, 
lxxx., 10. 
Cinnamon Tree—Cinuamomum; Prov., vii., 
17. Rev. xviii., 13. 
Fig Tree—Ficus carica; Deut. viii., 8. Matt, 
xx iv., 32. 
Fir Tree—Cupressus sempervirens; Ezekiel 
xxxi., 8. Isaiah xxxvii., 24. 
Frankincense—Amyris toxifera; Song of 
Sol. iii., 6. 
Husk or Carob Tree—Ceratonia siliqua; 
Luke xv., 16. 
Hyssop—Capparis rupestris; I. King iv.. 33. 
Mustard Tree—Salvadora Persica: Matt, 
xiii., 31. 
Olive Tree—Olea Europa?a; Hos. xiv., 6. 
Palm Tree—Phoenix dactylifera; Psalm 
lxixii., 12. 
Sycamore Tree—Ficus sycomorus; Amos 
vii.. 14. 
Wild Vine—Vitis Lnbrusca; Isaiah v., 5. 
“ The identification of the plants mentioned 
in the Bible is a task of great difficulty; and in 
almost all instances the result of the most 
learned investigations, whether by Bible com¬ 
mentators or by botanists, is unsatisfactory 
and open to doubt.” So says the Treasury of 
Botany. I will not, therefore, ask what sort of 
Frankincense the ancients got from Amyris 
toxifera, but I would like to know where on 
earth they got hold of our Northern Fox- 
grape, Vitis Lahrusca, which is purely an 
American species aud nowhere found wild in 
the Old World. No, not even to-day, let 
alone 2,200 years before Columbus discovered 
America! 
* * 
In answer to a query in the London Garden 
about an indoor grape-vine border and the 
best vines to plant in it where there is plenty 
of heat, W. Coleman (one of the best indoor 
fruit growers in Britain) answers, in sub¬ 
stance:—Build the vinery on arches or piers; 
have an inside and outside border; let the bed 
for the liordei* lie fou r feet deep, concreted and 
sloping one inch to the foot to the front, where 
should he a drain all the length of the border, 
In the bottom place a nine to eighteen inches 
deep layer of stones or brickbats covered over 
M'ith lime, rubbish and gravel, and over that 
a layer of sods green side down, then the soil. 
To begin with, have the border live feet w ide 
and altogether inside, or three feet inside and 
two feet outside aud walled around with sods, 
and year after year, as the vines demand it, 
add three to four feet in width to the border. 
For coinpost use equal parts of turf from a , 
heavy limestone pasture, one year stacked, and 
fresh soil free from lime off igneous rock; to six 
barrow-loads of this add one each of old lime \ 
rubble, charred refuse and burned earth, but ] 
no manure. Crushed one-half-inch bones { 
with the dust, to the extent of 12 per ] 
cent, of the whole mass, may be added j 
with advantage. Plant the vines—one-year- t 
olds—in February, March or April. In plant- t 
ing, wash away all the soil from the root-balls, * c 
disentangle the roots, spread them out in 
every direction and cover with fine soil; then 
put a stake to each vine aud cover the border 
with a mulching of short manure. Kinds of 
grape-vines for a warm house: Black Ham¬ 
burgh, Maddresfleld Court Muscat, Alicante, 
Foster’s Seedling, Buckland, Sweetwater and 
Muscat of Alexandria. For Autumn and 
Winter use add Gros Colmar, Lady Downes. 
Black Morocco, Alnick Seedling, Gros Guil¬ 
laume and White Tokay. I would say that 
ordinary pasture turf may be as good as 
that off a limestone pasture. 
* * 
Horticola’s note on abutilons, p. 652, 
prompts me to say that so far as I know them, 
Abutilon insigne has no equal as a Winter 
bloomer. It has large, prominently netted 
and rusty, hairy leaves, a scraggy habit if 
uncared for, and in Winter and Spring, in¬ 
stead of producing its blossoms singly, as in 
Boule de Niege, or in bunches as in Darwinii, it 
bears thorn as it were in long, pendant racemes 
or panicled racemes. The flowers are open, 
prominently veined and of a purplish-brown 
color. It seldom blossoms in Summer, is 
harder to propagate than most other Abuti¬ 
lons and may not bear transplanting with so 
little impunity. Leon. 
FRUIT NOTES. 
CHARLES A. GREEN. 
A blind man has more acute senses of 
feeling and hearing than his brother whose 
eyes are perfect. The strong mentally are apt 
to lie w< a’v physically—nature makes compen¬ 
sation for our defects. I never knew a man 
so bad but I could discover in him some trait to 
admire. Thus it is with fruits. We are search¬ 
ing for varieties possessing every require¬ 
ment, but must, be reminded that such varie¬ 
ties are an utter impossibility. We may make 
progress in size, or vigor, 'or productiveness, 
and lose in quality, health orbeauty. At rare 
intervals we make headway in many points of 
merit, and then the world applauds. Our 
progress is truly wonderful, and much may 
be hoped for, hut our expectation should 
not be given too wild a rein. 
No fruit garden is complete without a vine 
of the Iona Grape. Here it sets as much fruit 
as the Concord, and in order to induce it to 
ripen early we remove a portion before ma¬ 
turity—the earlier the better. The Iona is of 
better quality when partially ripe than many 
varieties when at their best. Crushed in the 
mouth, the pulp (if it may bo called pulp) 
dissolves instantly, and wo are refreshed as 
though sipping the finest old wines. It is al¬ 
most seedless—often having but one seed and 
that exceedingly small. Healthy and hardy 
as it is here, I wonder it is not more often 
called for at the nurseries. If some one 
should introduce a new variety as desirable, 
it would create a sensation. [The Iona has 
never borne a fair bunch of grapes at the 
Rural Grounds.— Eds.] 
Horticola asks for an improvement in 
color and quality on the valuable Ngm’ Rochelle 
Raspberry, and I assure him that I can fill the 
bill. An old gentleman in this county has 
found in his garden a seedling that proves to 
lie of better quality and color and much larger 
and more vigorous. It is the largest rasp¬ 
berry I have ever seen, and makes the largest 
plant, forming a hedge beliiud M-hich a farm 
wagon and team could be hidden from obser¬ 
vation. If Horticola will favor me with his 
address, I will gladly send him plants for 
testing. It is called Shaffer’s Colossal.—[Al¬ 
ready referred to as being tested at the Rural 
Grounds.— Eds.] 
Peach growers may lie congratulated on 
the art displayed by them in covering the 
different varieties with different colors of 
gauze, ostensibly to prevent too frequent test¬ 
ing of samples of the fruit, but, in fact, to 
enhance the beauty and price of the produce. 
No one but the initiated imagines how marvel¬ 
ously beautiful a basket of red-cheeked Craw¬ 
fords or Fosters may bo made by stretching 
a two-cent strip of gauze or mosquito net¬ 
ting over it. The observer will notice that 
different colors of gauze are used with differ¬ 
ent varieties, which he supposes to be merely 
a matter of chance, hut the suiting of the 
color to the variety is closely and shrewdly 
followed to the pecuniary advancement of the 
peach grower. I saw a man exhibiting some 
Crawfords at the Fair in baskets covered with 
pink gauze, and his peaches attracted a crowd, 
while others on .exhibition, equally large and 
showy, M'ere passed without notice. 
Fruit groM’ers find it important to give 
their goods a showy appearance in the mar¬ 
kets. “An article well put up is half sold,” is 
an old saying which applies well to fruit. The 
miserable practice of marketing grapes in 
market baskets holding half a bushel, whence 
the dealer dumps them upon his stand, where 
they are culled, thumbed, and clusters partially 
denuded by purchasers or loungers, then 
l wrapped in a bundle like so many onions 
i minus bloom and everything that makes them 
attractive, belongs to a past age. Grapes 
should lie gathered with shears designed for 
that purpose, and without handling be de- 
, posited in baskets holding five, ten or twenty 
1 pounds. These baskets should be covered, 
1 and sold by the pound with their contents 
The strawberry beds will soon require 
b covering for the Winter. The covering is 
? often put on too early. In fact, it is the re¬ 
peated thawing and freezing of Spring that 
often do the greatest injury. When the 
earth is frozen hard enough to bear up a 
wagon nnd team, the time to cover has come. 
If one has a few valuable plants it will pay 
l to cover the beds with evergreen boughs just 
• enough to shade the plauts— this is the best 
of ail coverings. Litter from the horse stable 
i is generally used, as it is light and easily scat- 
; tered, and enriches the soil. The objection is 
. that Timothy, clover and other seeds are not 
destroyed by the digestive organs of the horse, 
and these seed down the strawberry bods that 
. have been so carefully weeded. If wheat 
straw is spread now in the pasture or orchard 
, and permitted to he picked over and trodden 
by the stock for a few weeks, weed seeds 
will be detached from it, tbit straw shortened, 
and a desirable mulch secured. Heavy, 
cloddy manure should never be used for the 
covering of strawbeiries. Generally twice 
the amount of covering necessary is applied. 
On our clay loam covering is not absolutely 
necessary, yet it will pay by increasing the 
yield in most seasons. On low soils or any 
subject to heaving, covering is indispensable. 
It is often desirable to heel in trees and vines 
during the Winter, but this is a hazardous 
undertaking with the novice. High aud dry 
ground should be selected, the soil made fine 
and firmly pressed about the roots which 
should not be crowded together. Nurserymen 
cover stock thus heeled in with evergreen 
boughs, aud when the work is well done the 
stock is safer than when left undug But 
through haste aud carelessness I have seen 
stock taken out of the trenches in the Spring 
with blackened or moldy roots—completely 
ruined. If it is impossible to find an elevation, 
a ditoli should be opened to permit surplus 
water to escape. 
Monroe Co., N. Y. 
-- 
NOTES AND COMMENTS. 
Yes, Horticola (page 662), the abutilons are 
excellent plimts for room cultivation, and in 
the greenhouse or conservatory they are in¬ 
dispensable. Good, strong plants of A. Meso- 
potamicum and A. M. variegatum, when grown 
in six-inch pots nnd suspended from the raft¬ 
ers of the greenhouse, ami when trained on a 
low, circular trellis, are, when in full bloom, 
excellent decorative plants. But in order to 
see the flowers of this pretty species in all 
their beauty it is necessary that it should be 
grafted or inarched on some of the robust- 
growing species, such as A. Sautana or A. 
striatum, about four or five feet high. With 
a little care and attention as to pinching buck 
the shoots, it will soon form a compact head 
with drooping branches reaching almost to 
the ground, and M'ken in full bloom no plant 
can equal it in beauty. 
A. Tbompsonii is also an excellent room 
plant, and, whether in blossom or not, is al¬ 
M’ays attractive on account of its leaves being 
beautifully mottled with golden spots. It re¬ 
quires to be grown in a sunny situation in or¬ 
der to bring the variegation out distinctly. 
Its flowers are produced iu great profusion 
throughout the entire year. If I were confined 
to the choice of one abutilon, I would select 
this. 
A. Sellowanium maimoratum is another 
exceedingly attractive variegated variety and 
is also an excellent foliage plant, the large 
leaves being of a golden yellow, richly tesselated 
| with green. A. Auguste Pasewold is another 
beautifully variegated variety, the largo, thick¬ 
set, dark-green foliage being elegantly blocked 
with yellow. A. roseum superbum is another 
very distinct variety, and one that is well 
adapted for room cultivation ou account of its 
producing flowers in the greutest profusion. 
The flowers are of a rich rose-color, lieautifnlly 
veined with delicate pink. A. William Fow¬ 
ler, with bright yellow flowers; Snow Storm, 
of dwarf, compact habit and pure white flow - 
el’s; Santana, dark crimson, are also excellent 
varieties.. 
In cultivating the abutilons it is well to re¬ 
member tbe fact that they are greenhouse 
shrulis, attaining a bight of from four to eight 
feet, or oven more, so that where the necessary 
room can be given, large,old plants are valua¬ 
ble on account of the immense quantity of 
flowers which they produce. They can bo 
given the treatment as advised by Horticola, 
but for window cultivation I think that small¬ 
er plants would be preferable; so for this pur¬ 
pose I advise that young plants he propagated 
or procured in the Spring and planted out in 
