BULLETIN OF THE BUSSEY INSTITUTION. 147 
extent by farmers in the vicinity of our cities, and the swill of cities 
and that from distilleries. Bran also, which is decidedly more nitro- 
genous than maize, and of late years cotton-seed meal and Hunga- 
rian grass, are coming into general use. 
As has been suggested, already, the difficulty with regard to Indian 
corn, and it is a difficulty which has led to many errors in the fodder- 
ing practices of the American people, is that, in spite of its richness in 
oil and its easy digestibility, it is not sufficiently nitrogenous to be 
used to the best advantage in conjunction with many of the poorer 
kinds of fodder that need to be consumed at the farm. I have been 
strongly impressed by the truth of this remark when occupied with 
the analysis of the various foddering materials, such as bog-meadow 
hay, apples, shorts, broom-corn seed, and pumpkins, that have been 
reported upon in the Bussey Bulletin during the last five or six years. 
I have noticed so many instances where the use. of these materials, as 
described by our farmers, seems to have been erroneous, or, at the 
least, injudicious, that I find it difficult to escape the conviction that 
the whole subject of foddering has been very generally misunderstood 
in this country. It seems plain, at all events, that there is urgent 
need of the careful study of the subject by our farmers in numberless 
localities. 
The object of the present paper is to call attention to some special 
instances where the use of common foddering materials appears to have 
been wise or faulty, to enforce one general principle upon which 
judicious foddering must depend, and to urge that, in many of the 
American fodder rations that have been employed hitherto, the pro- 
portion of albuminoids is, chemically speaking, insufficient. For 
myself, I incline to the belief that the proportion of albuminoids in 
many of the fodder rations of this country is insufficient from the 
economical, as well as from the chemical point of view; or, in other 
words, that it is incompetent to produce, in practice, the greatest 
money profit in the localities where the rations now in question are 
actually used. 
The experience of our farmers, in the use of apples for feeding 
swine, affords many examples of both good and bad practice, as I have 
observed somewhat in detail since my previous article on this subject 
was written. It is plain, moreover, from what has been published 
upon the subject in our agricultural papers, that no clear and definite 
