BULLETIN OF THE BUSSEY INSTITUTION. o17 
No. 28. — A Special Instance of the Resistance of Clover- 
Seeds to Water. By F. H. Storer, Professor of Agri- 
cultural Chemistry. 
Tue following observation seems worthy of being put upon 
record, as corroborative of others relating to the same subject 
which have been published, and as illustrating anew a matter which 
is of no small importance to farmers. 
Not far from the Bussey Institution there is a sheet of water, 
some 56 acres in area, known as Jamaica Pond, which is practi- 
cally a great basin or reservoir from which water is pumped, by 
steam power, into an aqueduct which supplies a small part of the 
city of Boston. This pond is ordinarily kept full by the flowing in 
of rain-water from the surface of the adjacent country, and by the 
soaking in of ground-water from the surrounding soil. In the 
summer of 1880 there was a long-continued drought of such sever- 
ity that during several months the amount of water flowing into 
the pond from the natural sources of supply was much less than 
the quantity pumped out from the pond to feed the aqueduct. 
The surface of the pond was thus drawn down to an extremely 
low level; a broad, bare, somewhat gravelly margin was left upon 
the shore, and the proprietors of the aqueduct were finally forced 
to procure a supply of water from another corporation in order to 
supply a part, or perhaps the whole, of their customers. As soon 
as the term of drought was broken, the pumping went on again 
and was continued so constantly that the natural sources of supply 
could barely make good the water which was expended. They 
were incompetent to fill up the pond completely to the point at 
which it had stood before the drought began. In the year 1881 
there was still left a tolerably broad marginal beach around the 
pond. But in spite of its recent recovery from the water the 
gravel of this beach was not bare. Early in July, 1881, I noticed 
that the shore was thickly beset with white clover ( Trifolium repens) 
in blossom, and on requesting my colleague, Mr. C. E. Faxon, to 
view the premises with a botanist’s eye, he reported that there was 
not only an abundance of white clover on the beach, but a notice- 
able number of plants of yellow clover also ; that is to say the ‘* hop 
clover” (T. agrarium). Clover-seeds had evidently been sunk 
in previous years near the shores of the pond, when the water was 
