THE INCREASED YIELD OF CORN CROPS.
[To THE EDITOR OF THE " SPECTATOR.' I SIR,—I have not read the article by Mr. W. Beach Thomas referred to in your issue of the 15th inst., but your summary of his statements is so astonishing that I would like to warn your readers against accepting them implicitly. The same daily paper bad much to do with the extraordinary "boom" in certain sorts of potatoes introduced only a few years ago. Then fourteen pounds of the variety known as "Eldorado" : were sold for £100 per pound, and another sort was hardly less in demand. Yet to-day they are hardly ever heard of, and varieties which were in existence long before them bold the field. Still, no practical man will claim that even these are superior to the " Magnum Bonum," for instance, of a quarter of a century or more ago. So with oats. Some years ago two kinds known as "Abundance" and "Newmarket" were intro- duced about the same time. They were undoubtedly improvements on the old sorts commonly grown in England, and their success encouraged the introduction of many other new sorts, some of which are already forgotten or discredited. In fact, farmers are getting very chary of paying eighty or a hundred shillings per quarter for seed the produce of which cannot be depended upon to command more than the market price of feeding corn. The fault of all these vaunted varieties is that they are coarse, with thick hulls, so that they mill badly. So much so, that Scotch farmers are reverting to the old sorts of thirty years ago. They find that it takes a con- siderably greater quantity of these new ones to keep their horses in condition. If " private experimenters " have such good kinds up their sleeves, let them produce them. They have been boasting about them long enough, and there is great risk of their being anticipated by some one else, as experimenters on these lines are not confined to one place or
Previous page
