wheat, ninety-four stems; barley, 110 stems; oats, eighty-seven stems.86 The barley plant which had 110 stems thus gave something like 5,000 to 6,000 grains from one single grain. A careful drawing of that wonderful stubble was made by Major Hallett’s daughter and circulated with his pamphlets.87 Again, in 1876, a wheat plant, with “105 heads growing on one root, on which more than 8,000 grains were growing at once,” was exhibited at the Maidstone Farmers’ Club.88
Two different processes were thus involved in Hallett’s experiments: a process of selection, in order to create new varieties of cereals, similar to the breeding of new varieties of cattle; and a method of immensely increasing the crop from each grain and from a given area, by planting each seed separately and wide apart, so as to have room for the full development of the young plant, which is usually suffocated by its neighbours in our corn-fields.89
The double character of Major Hallett’s method — the breeding of new prolific varieties,and the method of culture by planting the seeds wide apart — seems, however, so far as I am entitled to judge, to have been overlooked until quite lately. The method was mostly judged upon its results; and when a farmer had experimented upon “Hallett’s Wheat,” and found out that it was late in ripening in his own locality, or gave a less perfect grain than some other variety, he usually did not care more about the method.90 However, Major Hallett’s successes or non-successes in breeding such or such varieties are quite distinct from what is to be said about the method itself of selection, or the method of planting wheat seeds wide apart. Varieties which were bred, and which I saw grown still at Manor Farm, on the windy downs of Brighton may be, or may not be, suitable to this or that locality. Latest physiological researches give such an importance to evaporation in the bringing of cereals to maturity that where evaporation is not so rapid as it is on the Brighton Downs, other varieties must be resorted to and bred on purpose.91 I should also suggest