The Middlebury register and Addison County journal. [volume] (Middlebury, Vt.) 1883-1885, 1883-10-12
FARM, GARDEN AND HOUSEHOLD.
The Sccd Test.

Professor w. Carruthers, consulting
botanist to the Royal Agricultural So
ciety of England, gives this plan for de-
termining the terminating power of
sample of seeds, together with an illus
trative example of the Importance of
such tests. We quote from the summary
of the Mark Lane Express
Let 200, or 100, or fifty, as may be
thought best, of the seeds be counted
out and placed one deep on the surface
placed in larger plate or in shallow
pan containing about a quarter of an
inch in depth of water, and over all
there should be inverted another
pan, sufficiently large to entirely
inclose the vessel containing the water.
The depth of water should not be sufii-
cient to allow of its overlooking into the
plate containing the seeds. The whole
arrangement should then be set in a
moderately warm place, and thus the
seeds will be subjected to all the condi-
tons favorable to termination, namely,
air, moisture, darkness and warmth.
The air will circulate freely beneath the
edges of the inverted pan; the atmos-
phere inside the pan will be quite satu-
rated with moisture for evaporation will
continually go on from the surface of the
inclosed water; light will be excluded
by the inverted pan, and the temperature
of a regularly kitchen will very well
suffice to induce termination.
A little fresh water should be poured
in now and then to replace that which
evaporates, the cover-pan being momen-
tarily 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 to 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 germi-
mated, and to estimate the percentage
of failures An exact number of
seeds need not necessarily be taken,
and, indeed, it is perhaps fairer to
take spoonful haphazard out of the
sample, count these, and place them all
in the terminating apparatus. Suppose
143 seeds have thus been taken, and that
102 of these are found to terminate :;
then out of 143 there are Il failures; so that
we should infer that about twenty-eight
per cent. of the seeds in the sample would
not terminate when sown. A more cor
rect result is obtained by conducting
two, or even three distinct sets of ex-
periments simultaneously, and striking a
mean between the several results, which,
by the way, should not show much varia-
ton.
The report states that in several sam
pies of seeds of Alopecurus pratcnsis, the
common and useful meadow foXtail grass,
very small ercentage-sometimc only
one or two-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 glumcs, 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 terminating power of
seeds before sowing were more generally
followed we should probably hear less Of
the blowing up of land on which sown
seeds had failed to strike"