BULLETIN OF THE BUSSEY INSTITUTION. 153 
by sowing rye in June, mowing it in late summer, or in September 
before the shooting of the stalks, and making it into hay as if it were 
so much grass. After mowing, the plants were left to themselves to 
take a fresh start, as if the seed had just been sown; and next year 
the crop was allowed to grow in the usual way, and the grain was 
harvested in due course. A somewhat similar idea has been carried 
out by some New England farmers, who, in renovating old pastures, 
have sown rye together with grass seed, and have subsequently allowed 
cattle to feed so constantly upon the young plants that the grain 
stalks could never find an opportunity to shoot up. When treated in 
this way, rye is said to’show great endurance, and to yield excellent 
pasturage through several years. 
It has been often urged as a practical objection to the mowing or 
pasturing of fields of winter grain that the grain crop proper suffers 
~more than the amount of forage obtained is worth, and it is manifestly 
questionable on the face of the matter whether it is proper to tamper 
in this way with the growth of a crop. It should be determined, by 
experiments, in how far the natural needs and habits of the grain 
plant can be interfered with by such systems of pruning, without 
serious injury to the proper crop. The subject is an interesting one 
for its own sake, and would seem to be worthy of more careful inves- 
tigation than has been given to it hitherto. 
Bran or shorts, as is well known, is more highly nitrogenous than 
the grain from which it has been derived; and all the products known 
as middlings, fine feed, and mill feed, contain a larger proportion of ni- 
trogen than the meal or flour from which they have been separated by 
sifting, though, as I was at pains to show in a previous paper, the 
wheaten bran or shorts, &c., of commerce are all rather less highly 
nitrogenous than has been commonly taught hitherto in works relating 
to the chemistry of agriculture. In the following table, A repre- 
sents the average composition of American shorts as determined by 
analyses made in the Bussey laboratory;* B represents the aver- 
age composition of European bran as deduced from a critical examina- 
tion of all the analyses accessible to me in 1872;* and C gives 
the average composition of European brans as obtained from Dietrich 
& Keenig’s collection } of nineteen recent analyses, none of which were 
* See Bulletin of the Bussey Institution, 1. 36. 
+ In their “ Zusammensetzung und Verdaulichkeit der Futterstoffe,” Berlin, 
1874, pp. 35, 36. 
