The Austin weekly statesman. (Austin, Tex.) 1883-1898, 1883-10-11
HOME, FARM AND RANCH,
TO TEST SEED.


Prof. w. Carruthers, consulting Be
tanis to the Royal Agricultural So
ciety of England, gives, in the Mari
Lane Express, the following plan 10
determining the terminating powe
of seeds:
Let 200, or 100, or 80 as may b,
thought best, of the seeds be counted
out and placed one deep on the sur
face of the plate. This plate should
be placed in q larger plate or in 4 shall
low pan, containg about quarter OF
an inch in depth of water, and over
all there should be inverted another
pan, sufficiently large to entirely in
| close the vessel containing the water
| The depth of water should not be
sufficient to allow of its overlooking
into the plate containg the seeds.
The whole arrangement should then
| be set in a moderately warm place,
and thus the seeds will be subjected
to all the conditions favorable to ger
mlnation, namely, air, moisture, dark
ness and warmth. The air will circu-
late freely beneath the edges of the
inverted pan; the atmosphere inside
the pan will be quite saturated with
moisture, for evaporation will con-
tinually go on from the surface of the
Inclosed water; light will be excluded
by the inverted pan, and the tempera-
ture OF a regularly used kitchen will
suffice TO induce termination.
"A little fresh water should be
poured in now and then to replace
thatlwhich evaporates, the cover pan
being momentarily removed for this
purpose. Even in one and the same
sample some of the seeds will always
terminate before others, but when the
young shoots of the first terminate
have attained length of from half
an inch to one inch, it may be fairly
concluded that all the seeds capable
of terminating have done so. and
then it is only necessary to count the
number of seeds which have not ger
minated, and to estimate the percent
age of failures. An exact number of
seeds need not necessarily be taken
and, indeed, it is perhaps fairer to take
a spoonful haphazard out of the sam
pie, count these, and place them all in
the terminating apparatus. Suppose
143 seeds have thus been taken, and
that 1O2 of these are found to germi-
nate, then out OF 143 there are forty
one failures, so that we should infer
that about 70 per cent of the seeds in
the sample would not terminate when
soWn. A more correct result is OBJ
tanned by conducting two. or even
three distinct sets Of experiments
simultaneously, and striking a mean
between the several results, which,
by the way, should not show much
variation.
The report states that in several
samples of seeds of Alopecurus pra-
tensiS, the common and useful meadow
foXtail grass, a very small percentage
sometimes only one or taw- of the
seeds were able to terminate. This is
attributed to the fact that the seeds
were gathered unripe, and in many
cases the sample consisted only of
empty glumes, SO that it Was like chaff
without any grain; possibly, however,
there are still some traders who adopt
the pernicious practice of working off
their old stock by mixing old seeds
with new ones, just as grocerS mix
their old Barcelona nuts with the new
seasons arrivals, and if the old seeds
have lost their vitality the sample is,
of course, seriously deprecated. If
the practice of determining the germi-
mating power of seeds before sowing
were more generally followed we
should probably here less of the plow-
ing up of land on which soWn seeds
had failed to strike"