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Such professors as are at this moment, in almost every newspaper in the country, scientific journals among the number, abusing and ridiculing the poor farmer for destroying the birds that destroy his grain; and telling him, if he were to let the birds alone, they would eat the insects that commit far greater devastation on his precious cerealia!
If we furnish the soil with ammonia, and the phosphates, which are indispensable to the cerealia, with the alkaline silicates, we have all the conditions necessary to ensure an abundant harvest. The atmosphere is an inexhaustible store of carbonic acid.
I have no doubt, however, that the cerealia of La Belle Alliance would have been much more nutritive if the top-dressing which the plain received during the three days of June, 1815, had not been robbed of its stamina by London dentists, who carried off the soldiers' teeth in hogsheads; and by Yorkshire bone-grubbers, who freighted several transports with the skeletons of regiments of troopers, as well as troop-horses, to be ground to dust in Kingston-upon-Hull, and drilled with turnip seed in the chalky districts of the North and West Ridings of Yorkshire.
Those plants, in which all the nitrogen may be said to be concentrated in the seeds, as the cerealia, contain on the whole less nitrogen than the leguminous plants, peas, and clover. The produce of nitrogen on a meadow which receives no nitrogenised manure, is greater than that of a field of wheat which has been manured.
Some penalty must attach itself to unauthorized intruders, even in thought, upon the Cerealia. I don't wish to be disagreeable, or to suggest unpleasant misgivings to the masculine mind, but do you think we are always compassionated as much as we deserve?
All plants cultivated as food require for their healthy sustenance the alkalies and alkaline earths, each in a certain proportion; and in addition to these, the cerealia do not succeed in a soil destitute of silica in a soluble condition.
The phosphoric acid of the phosphate of lime, indispensable to the cerealia and other vegetables in the formation of their seeds, is separated as an excrement, in great quantities, by the rind and barks of ligneous plants. How different are the evergreen plants, the cacti, the mosses, the ferns, and the pines, from our annual grasses, the cerealia and leguminous vegetables!
Surely the cerealia and leguminous plants which we cultivate must derive their carbon and nitrogen from the same source whence the graminea and leguminous plants of the meadows obtain them! No doubt can be entertained of their capability to do so. In Virginia, upon the lowest calculation, 22 pounds weight of nitrogen were taken on the average, yearly, from every morgen of the wheat-fields.
But the cerealia, and plants grown for their roots, meet on our fields, in the remains of the preceding crop, with a quantity of decaying vegetable substances corresponding to their contents of mineral nutriment from the soil, and consequently with a quantity of carbonic acid adequate to their accelerated development in the spring.
In the vicinity of the swamps of Palm-tree Creek, I noticed a grass with an ear much resembling the bearded wheat: with the exception of the cultivated Cerealia, it had the largest seed I ever met with in grasses; even my Blackfellow was astonished at its remarkable size.
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