fUSSaaSSa? 
?^p r , g r.2M -^ae^-igaB ffl ffl a gBfagfle 
THE CULTIVATOR. 
ORIGINAL COMMUNICATIONS. 
“In Agriculture, Experience is of great value— Theories of 
little, excepting as they are directly deducible from actual ex¬ 
periments and well attested facts.” 
INT22SSSTIN® LETTERS. 
We are indebted to the Rev. Dr. Sprague of this city, for 
copies of two letters, one on the origin and history of Indian 
corn, written by T. Pickering, Esq. to S. M. Hopkins, Esq., 
and the other on the prevention of the caterpillar and 
canker worm, by H. Marchant, Esq. They will no doubt 
be interesting to our readers. We must beg leave to dissent 
from the opinion advanced by Mr. Pickering, that corn was 
indigenous in China, for the following reasons :—1st. There 
is not a particle of evidence that Zea mays, Indian corn, was 
known in any European country till after its introduction 
from America; this fact is admitted by all. 2d. There is no 
reason to suppose, had corn been indigenous and of general 
cultivation in China, that it would not have, long before the 
discovery of America, found its way to the west of Europe, 
as other plants and fabrics, clearly of Asiatic origin, certainly 
did ; for instance, silk and rice. As soon as it was introdu¬ 
ced into Europe, after the discovery of America, it made the 
circuit of the Eastern continents with astonishing rapidity, 
and, wherever it can be cultivated, across the continents of 
Europe and Asia, from France to China, has become a gene* 
ral favorite. 3d. The universal and rapid spread of Indian 
corn through Europe and Asia has a parallel in the intro¬ 
duction and spread of the cereal grains in this country from 
the old world. We gave Europe and Asia corn and pota¬ 
toes ; they furnished America with wheat, barley, and oats. 
And after a lapse of 200 years, it is no more strange to find 
corn in China, than wheat in Wiskonsan or at Bogota. 
Origin and History of Indian Corn. 
Salem, September 3d, 1824. 
Dear Sir— I have just received your letter of the 28th 
ult. requesting information concerning maize, or Indian corn, 
its history, culture, properties, &c. s your call is expres¬ 
sive of urgency, I lose no time in communicating what little I 
know, corresponding with your inquiries, and just as my re¬ 
collection servos me. 
Formerly, I supposed that maize was not only indigenous, 
but exclusively an American plant; and that from the new, 
it was carried to the old world—at least to Europe. I retain¬ 
ed this opinion until, in reading Sir George Staunton’s ac¬ 
count of Lord Macartney’s embassy to China, I found it 
was extensively cultivated in the northern parts of that vast 
empire. As they ascendend the Yellow River, and ap¬ 
proached the region of Pekin, Sir George says they saw im¬ 
mense fields of Indian corn. But I do not recollect that he 
specifies any variety. The first thought which then occurred 
was, that on the supposition that America was peopled by 
emigrants from the eastern coasts of Asia, they carried the 
grains of maize with them. But why mav we not suppose 
this plant to be indigenous in both worlds? especially when 
we consider its numerous varieties. Had maize been found 
in the vicinity of the only Chinese port frequented by Euro¬ 
pean and American ships, ( Canton) we might imagine it was 
carried thither in those ships. You ask, 
“ Was it known to the ancients! ” This is a question for 
an antiquarian, or a learned naturalist, to answer. I can 
only say that, a few years ago, in turning over the leaves o£ 
two octavo volumes, written, perhaps fifty or more years ago, 
by a Reverend Mr. Dixon, ot Scotland, (I forget his Christian 
name) in which he professes to transcribe from all the Ro¬ 
man rustic writers, every thing valuable or curious in the 
husbandry of that nation (his extracts are accompanied with 
a translation) and in which are described all the species of 
farinaceous plants which they cultivated, I found nothing 
that bore any similitude to maize. 
Now that I am in the country of the Romans, I will stop 
to mention, (what, however, you may know better than I,) 
that maize is extensively cultivated in Italy. From one 
statement which fell in my way within two or three years 
past, it appeared that in Tuscany, they raised more bushels 
of maize than of wheat, and in the travels of M. Chateauvieux, 
(a Genevan) written in the form (I think) of letters, some 
fifteen or more years ago, it appeared, that in the minute 
farms (five or six acres) of the peasantry in the region of 
mount Vesuvius, maize was the grain cultivated, as the arti¬ 
cle which afforded the chief subsistence of their families. 
Barlow found hasty pudding, of Indian meal, in Savoy, if I 
rightly remember, and celebrated its good qualities in a poem. 
The “properties” of maize. Barlow, I believe, ascribes 
the athletic size of his parents’ numerous sons, to the nutri¬ 
tive qualities of this grain. Count Rumford, in one of his es¬ 
says, mentions the opinion expressed to him by some of the 
South Carolina planters, (he was in that state at one time in 
the revolutionary war,) that the negroes preferred the same 
measure of Indian corn, to that of rice; giving this reason— 
“it made sirong to work.” 
You wished “ to trace the length of the small fibrous roots.” 
This I have never attempted. But I recollect, that, in con¬ 
versation with Peter Oliver, when he was a Judge of the 
Massachusetts Superior Court, (of which he was finally the 
mandamus chief justice,) anterior to our revolution,—a gentle¬ 
man of amiable manners, affable, and fond of agriculture,— 
he informed me, that in passing on a road where some men 
were digging a well, in a hollow of rich ground planted with 
Indian corn, he alighted, and traced some of the roots to the 
depth of nine or eleven feet below the surface. 
Jethro Tull, the father of the English horse-hoeing hus¬ 
bandry, who wrote his book ninety years ago, considers the 
cutting off the small lateral roots of wheat, as important to 
the most vigorous growth of the plants; on the principle, if I 
mistake not, that their excision caused a multiplication of 
fibrous roots, and so increased the number of mouths by 
which the plants received their food: as numerous shoots 
will spring from the limb of a tree cut off in pruning. Such 
excisions must be extremely beneficial, if what Dr. James 
Anderson (I do not recollect im which of his works) states, 
as ascertained by the experiments of a French naturalist (I 
think Bonet by name) be true—that plants do not derive 
nourishment through the pores of the bark of the roots, but 
solely through their ends. I confess that 1 doubted the cor¬ 
rectness of those experiments; and the more, because the 
present Thomas Andrews Knight, now president of the Lon¬ 
don Horticultural Society, and who, Sir Humphrey Davy 
says, has thrown more light on the vegetation of plants, than 
all preceding naturalists, speaks expressly of plants deriving 
I”^^^ u l r ittient, in part at least, through the bark. 
How far north does the culture of maize extend?” It is 
raised m Maine'—I believe, in every part of the state. But 
in the more northern parts, I presume they plant only the 
yellow, small eared kind, called Canada corn. It is mostly 
eight rowed, the rows and grains closely set. The Connecti¬ 
cut settlers at Wyoming would plant it in June, and obtain 
full-ripe crops. I have raised it in the neighborhood of Sa- 
■ m " u 18 valuaWe . ^ or Panting, and for a northern re¬ 
gion : but neither in product nor flavor, is it equal to our 
larger yellow corn. I first heard the word “ Tucket ” corn, 
among the people at Wyoming ; and I made then the same 
conjecture that you have done—that it was corn originally 
from Nantucket. That sandy island would naturally hasten 
the ripening of corn, and give it the habit of early ripening: 
just as a variety of Bailey (called “rath ripe ”) in England, 
produced on their warm “ chiltern ” grounds, acquires a habit 
of ripening earlier than barley sown on richer and colder 
soils. 
Thus f ar you have what my hasty recollections furnish on 
the subject of your inquiries. I will now add an extract from 
a book published in 1795, by the English Board of Agricul¬ 
ture, being the Report of a committee on the culture of pota¬ 
toes, in which I remembered that some of the properties of 
maize were incidentally mentioned. It is from an analysis 
of the potatoe root, by George Pearson, M. D. and F. R. S. 
The experiments were made by him at the request of the 
Board ot Agriculture. 
The Extract. “ The composition, or more properly the 
mixture of the potatoe-root, is, in many respects, similar to 
that of the seed of wheat and of maize. We are indebted to 
James Bartholomew Beccari, professor of chemistry at Bo¬ 
logna, about 70 years ago, for the important discovery, that 
the meal of wheat and maize contained not only starch, but 
a soluble mucilage or extract, and a glue of the same nature 
as animal matter. These three substances are only mechani¬ 
cally mixed with one another. The glue is not capable of 
the saccharine, vinous, or acid fermentation ; but like animal 
matter, putrefies.” Dr. Pearson says the meal of potatoes 
contains no animal matter. “ The proportion of the animal 
glue of wheat,” says the Doctor, “is stated variously, in dif¬ 
ferent experiments; but the general mean result appears to 
be, that it is about one twelfth of the meal. To this glue is 
imputed the superior quality of wheat-meal for bread.” 
We have no varieties of Indian corn, other than are com¬ 
monly known in the same latitude in your state. A yellow 
corn (of 8, 10, or 12 rows—chiefly of 8 rows), is most gene¬ 
rally raised; and the ears appear to me to be the same that 
the people at Wyoming called Tucket corn. Here and there 
a farmer raises a white flint corn, very like, color excepted, 
to the former. We have some sweet corn for boiling in the 
ear, while in the milk. I never saw any grains of a crimson 
color, except on some parts of the ears of Mandane corn, 
brought to Washington by Lewis and Clark, and of which 
Mr. Jefferson gave ire a few grains: it was not worthy cul¬ 
tivating. Last year I saw some large eared and large grain¬ 
ed corn, brought from up the Missouri. It ripened in this 
county; but better when crossed with our yellow corn. 
„ TIMOTHY PICKERING. 
Samuel M. Hopkins, Esq. 
The Cankerworm. 
Newport, Feb. 28, 1793. 
Hon. Justin Ely, Esq—I was the last evening favored 
with yours of the 14th inst. “It is with real pleasure I com¬ 
municate to vou, sir, the information I have had of the effi¬ 
cacy of quicksilver in destroying the canker worm, so de¬ 
structive to our apple trees. Having been informed of an 
instance in which the trial had a complete effect, I was in¬ 
duced to examine into the facts personally. I waited upon 
the gentleman who had declared the success of his experi¬ 
ment:—A Mr. McCurrie, a gentleman who owns and im¬ 
proves a good farm on this island,—a man of good observa¬ 
tion, an excellent farmer, and on whose credit the utmost re¬ 
liance may be had. He had several orchards, but the one 
the experiment was made in was an old orchard of very large 
trees. Nine trees, the most central in the orchard, he bored 
with a spike gimlet about four or five feet from the ground, 
an inch and an half or two inches into the tree, rather slant¬ 
ing the boring downwards. He procured an ounce of quick¬ 
silver from an apothecary—-half an ounce he inserted into one 
of the trees, a quarter of an ounce he inserted into three trees 
in equal quantities, and the other quarter of an ounce as 
equally as he could, he divided into five other trees. He then 
plugged up the holes tight. This was done, I think, in De¬ 
cember. Some weeks after, he took out the plugs, and found 
the quicksilver in the same state he had put it in. He 
again plugged up the holes, and sometime after the sap of the 
trees had begun to ascend, he again took out the plugs and 
found the quicksilver was gone, leaving behind something 
like the slime of a snail. The worms came as they had done 
the year before, and totally destroyed all the verdure, &c. of 
all the trees except those nine, which were in as good order 
as ever they had been, and yielded their common plenty of 
apples, about one hundred bushels. The boughs of some of 
the nine trees interlayed, and were interwoven with the 
branches of the other trees ; and he said the fruit upon them 
was equally good, while the branches of the other trees so in¬ 
terwoven amongst them, appeared as though they had been 
fired. The trees with the least quantity of quicksilver were 
equally protected or preserved, as the one which had half an 
ounce. He inserted the quicksilver with a quill open at one 
end and the side of it cut in the manner we make a pen, the 
more readily to let the quicksilver into the quill. 
As to the Palmer Worms, I know nothing of them ; he 
made no complaints of them. If they are a worm which al¬ 
ways follow tne other, they might have been equally affected. 
It seems the quicksilver might have been diffused by the sap 
to the very extremes of all the ramifications of the trees. 
I should think it may not yet be too late to try the experi¬ 
ment, though I should prefer the latter end of January or be¬ 
ginning of February, for inserting the quicksilver.” Perhaps 
credit might be given to the effect of such an experiment, by 
reasoning from the effect which mercury has upon the hu¬ 
man body. But I leave that province to others, whose pro¬ 
fessions and abilities are more adequate to the undertaking; 
—ever preferring facts to theory, and that humble track to 
the labyrinths of fancy and imagination. At any rate, facts 
and successful experiments are most encouraging to the farm¬ 
er, who ought to be lead by a certainly of success or gain, as 
too many can illy bear unsuccessful labor or expense. I 
have heard of an attempt of the like kind as the foregoing, 
made without success; but this was attributed to an im¬ 
proper time of inserting ihe quicksilver, viz. in June. 
I have the honor to be, most respectfully, your obedient 
humble servant,_ HENRY M ARCHANT. 
The Peach—Important Experiment. 
Messrs. Gaylord & Tucker— In the spring of 1837, I 
wrote to Judge Buel, asking him to join mein experiments 
on the Peach Tree with Salt Petre, and proposed to give the 
result through the medium of the Cultivator to the public. I 
gave as my reason for that request, that as far as my observa¬ 
tions extended, I had always observed that on soils contain¬ 
ing nitre and muriate of soda, the Peach tree lives luxuriantly 
to an advanced age, while upon soils immediately adjoining, 
immature decay takes place, and the tree seldom attains the 
age of seven years. As instances in vindication of this oc¬ 
cur so frequently, I have been astonished to see them passed 
over without notice, and now advert to some of thvm to es¬ 
tablish the truth of this position. Peach trees growing in the 
site where once stood a dwelling, generally live to an old 
age, the soil of which, by analysis, will give a proportion of 
nitre. The same thing occurs in many districts of the West 
and South West; upon one farm the occupant has no diffi¬ 
culty in having good peaches, while his neighbor finds it a 
laborious task to prolong the life of the tree to a few years, 
and on well cultivated farms near the seaboard, I have been 
informed, they have but little difficulty in growing this tree. 
Having these and other instances for my guidance, I com¬ 
menced experiments with salt and salt petre,in the year 18.fi, 
upon an orchard six years old; clover was sowed upon it that 
spring, and it remained in grass till last fall, when it was 
plowed and sown in wheat, and clover this spring. The 
trees in ’36 were full of worms; some of the trees were dead, 
others apparently dying, and but very few put on the appear¬ 
ance of health; such was its distempered condition that some 
of my friends advised me to cut down about one-half of those 
that yet showed life, saying that such was the practice of 
Peach growers. I thought it would be a bad practice for a 
physician to destroy one or more of a family to prevent dis¬ 
ease from spreading, and after cutting down those that were 
dead, I commenced operations on the balance with equal 
quantities of salt and salt petre combined, applying about a 
half a pound upon the surface and in contact with tlie trunk 
of the tree; then sowed it broadcast over part of the orchard, 
at the rate of about two bushels per acre. The result of this 
application, to the surprise of my friends, was the appearance 
of perfect health, with new and vigorous shoots, the trees full 
of fruit, which matured with increased size and improved 
flavor. Towards the last of March, and again in May and 
September, 1837,1 applied the same ingredients in different 
proportions without observing much difference in the effect; 
though I have since thought that where I applied the salt 
petre alone, and where the largest portion of the mixture was 
nitre, the effect was best; but in consequence of the price of 
salt petre, I have endeavored to ascertain the smallest quan¬ 
tity that should be used, and I would not advise less than one- 
eighth, though I should prefer one-fourth or more. My trees 
this fall (1837,) were free from worms, all doing well, and I 
have found no further use for the axe in the orchard. In the 
year 1838, 1 applied the mixture to a part of my orchard in 
March, the other part received the application in June and 
September; upon that part done in March, I had an abun¬ 
dance of fruit, while those done in the 6th and 8th months 
were comparatively destitute of fruit, it having been killed by 
a late frost. It occurred to me that I was 'indebted to the 
salt, &c., for the abundance of fruit on the trees done in 
March, by its retarding vegetation ; and from an experiment 
made in ’39, it appeared to be the case, though I have never 
considered it of sufficient importance to repeat it, for the pur¬ 
pose of testing it further. 
In regard to the best time to make this application, I would 
say about the first of April, and to those trees having worms 
in them again in June or September, as the appearance of 
the worm may indicate its necessity, using about two-thirds 
of the usual quantity for the June or September dressing, and 
to be used only in contact with the trunk of the tree. I have 
not discovered any great benefit from sowing it broadcast 
over the orchard every year; I prefer to do this every second 
or third year. If the tree is injured very much by the worm, 
to wash the bark of the trunk with a solution of this mixture 
and water might be of service, being careful not to apply too 
much; this should not prevent its application in a powdered 
state. To my trees planted in the fall and spring, I apply as 
soon as done planting in the spring about one ounce upon the 
surface, in contact with the trunk of the tree, and repeat this 
quantity again early in June or September, the Peach worm 
at these two last periods, being in their infancy, are destroyed. 
In August, after one application of this mixture to my young 
trees in the spring, I have taken several worms from off the 
outer bark of a tree, bedded in gum, they having punctured it 
in a number of places, but did not penetrate to do any injury to 
the inner bark, while the next tree left without the above mix¬ 
ture was nearly destroyed, the inner bark being eaten for 
more than two-thirds around the tree. It might be supposed 
that the salt and salt petre would produce instantaneous 
death, but this is not the case; I have kept them half covered 
in a solution of salt and water, and salt petre and water, and 
in these two articles combined for several hours without 
causing death; they will avoid its approach, and will not re¬ 
main in it unless compelled by necessity. 
In compliance with the promise heretofore made, I have 
endeavored to give in a brief manner my practice on the 
Peach tree for five years, from which I have no reason to 
make a change, but many inducements for a continuance of 
the practice. If you consider it sufficiently important for 
publication, it is at your disposal, and if any benefit should 
arise therefrom, be assured it would be the highest reward 
for any services of mine that could be tendered to, dear sirs, 
your obedient servant, LYTTLETON PHYSICK. 
Ararat Farm, Cecil county, Maryland, July 6, 1841. 
