good butter. 
580 
‘proverb affirms it to be essential to every good 
salad. It tastes and smells like cucumbers, and 
is therefore used to flavour other salads; and 
produces slightly cheering and even exhilarating 
effects. It naturally delights in calcareous soil, 
yet thrives in either sandy ground or fine gravel; 
and it requires, within the garden, to be culti- 
vated in some kind of decidedly light, and, if 
possible, calcareous soil, both poor and dry. A 
small bed of it is sufficient for a family ; and this 
| ought to be selected in some exposed spot; and, 
if naturally loamy or otherwise rich, it ought to 
be largely impoverished with an intermixture of 
chalk, bricklayer’s rubbish, or sand and gravel. 
When propagated from seed, it may be sown 
either in autumn as soon as the seed is ripe, or 
in any open weather between the latter part of 
| February and the end of May; but when sown 
in spring, it is liable either to fail or to lie un- 
sprung till the following year. It may be sown 
either broadcast, or in drills six inches asunder, 
but, in either case, not more than half an inch 
deep. The plants, when two or three inches in 
| height, may be thinned to distances from one 
another of six inches; and, when fully matured, 
they should be occasionally cut down in summer, 
to promote the growth of young shoots. Slips or 
partings of the roots may also be used for propa- 
gating salad burnet ; and these should be planted 
in September or October, and occasionally watered 
till they become fully established. 
Common burnet, as a forage plant, was at one 
time extolled as of wondrous value, but has 
proved, from manifold experiment and prolonged 
trial, to be of but limited and comparatively 
small importance. It was brought into notice 
as an agricultural plant, about the middle of last 
century, by Mr. Rocque of Walham-Green; and 
it made the same kind of sensation among the 
agriculturists of England, which the fiorin of Dr. 
Richardson made at a later period among the 
agriculturists of Ireland. Even in one of the 
best known works of the justly celebrated Arthur 
Young, published so late as the year 1804, so 
singularly laudatory a passage respecting it as 
the following occurs :—“ Burnet, I am fully per- 
suaded, will prove a very great acquisition to 
husbandry on many accounts, but more particu- 
larly for the following reasons. Burnet is a good 
winter pasture; consequently it will be of great 
service to the farmer, as a constant crop he may 
depend upon, and that without any expense for 
seed or tillage, after the first sowing. It affords 
both corn and hay. Burnet seed is said to be as 
good as oats for horses. I know they will eat it 
very well; judge then the value of an acre of 
land which’ gives you at two mowings ten quar- 
ters of corn and three loads of hay. The seed 
indeed is too valuable to be put to that use at 
present ; though it multiplies so fast, that I doubt 
not but in a few years the horses will be fed with 
it. It will bear pasturing with sheep. It makes 
It never blows or hoves cattle. 
BURNET. 
Tt will flourish upon poor, light, sandy, stony, 
shaltery, or chalky land. Burnet, after the first 
year, will weed itself, and be kept clean at little 
or no expense. The cultivation of burnet is 
neither hazardous nor expensive; if the land be 
prepared, as is generally done for a crop of tur- 
nips, there is no danger of any miscarriage, and 
any person may be supplied with the best seed 
at 6d. per pound.” But the only truly valuable 
properties of burnet as an agricultural plant are 
its adaptation to very poor soils, its sturdy re- 
sistance of the severest frosts of winter, and its 
yielding early spring herbage to stock. Both in 
weight of produce and in proportion of nutritive 
matter, it is much inferior to the clovers and to 
other leguminous herbage plants. When made 
into hay, and when unmixed with other herbage, 
it is coarse and unpalatable. Even in its succu- 
lent or growing state, if uncombined with grasses 
or clovers, it is rejected by all animals except 
when they are voracious with hunger. 
much and profitably grown by stock farmers, 
particularly by upland sheep farmers, as an im- 
portant element of food in the scarce and pinch- 
ing season of early spring; it enjoys a just re- | 
putation as the very best adapted of all known 
forage plants for maintaining a winter verdure, 
and resisting the severest frosts in bleak and ex- 
posed situations; and when grown mixedly with 
the grasses of hill pastures, it is always eaten 
close to the ground by sheep and cattle, and is 
believed to exert upon them the influences of a | 
tonic and an aromatic. When intended for hay 
on low grounds, or for summer pasture on up- 
lands, it ought to be mixed with some of the 
grasses or with white clover; and, when grown 
on very poor chalky soils as the most profitable 
herbage likely to be supported by their semi- 
sterility, it ought to be combined with echinoch- | 
loa crus-galli and small quantities of schedonorus 
pratensis and perennial fescue. About three 
pecks of burnet and one bushel of echinochloa 
cerus-galli are suitable for an acre; and the pro- 
per time of sowing is April. Mr. Young recom- 
mends that about a bushel of burnet per acre 
should be sown in April, with either barley or 
oats, and covered at two harrowings; and he 
teaches also that it may be sown with buckwheat 
in May. 
Several varieties of the common burnet are in 
cultivation, particularly two with respectively 
smoother and less smooth leaves, and a third 
-with larger seeds than either of these two; but 
all are inconstant and merely seminal.— The 
sweet hybrid, the polygamous, and the agrimony- 
leaved species, all hardy herbaceous species, the 
first from France, the second from Hungary, and 
the third from Spain, are occasionally grown in 
British gardens as ornamental plants. The 
tailed species and the prickly species, both small 
evergreen shrubs, the former from the Canaries, 
and the latter from the Levant, may be met with 
in some British greenhouses.—Smith—Miller.— 
It is | 
