A few words on this method which now claims the attention of the experimental stations may perhaps not be useless.
In Japan, rice is always treated in this way. It is treated as our gardeners treat lettuce and cabbage — that is, it is let first to germinate; then it is sown in special warm corners, well inundated with water and protected from the birds by strings drawn over the ground. Thirty-five to fifty-five days later, the young plants, now fully developed and possessed of a thick network of rootlets, are replanted in the open ground. In this way the Japanese obtain from twenty to thirty-two bushels of dressed rice to the acre in the poor provinces, forty bushels in the better ones, and from sixty to sixty-seven bushels on the best lands. The average, in six rice-growing states of North America, is at the same time only nine and a half bushels.202
In China, replanting is also in general use, and consequently the idea has been circulated in France by M. Eugene Simon and the late M. Toubeau, that replanted wheat could be made a powerful means of increasing the crops in Western Europe. 203
So far as I know, the idea has not yet been submitted to a practical test; but when one thinks of the remarkable results obtained by Hallet’s method of planting; of what the market-gardeners obtain by replanting once and even twice; and of how rapidly the work of planting is done by market-gardeners in Jersey, one must agree that in replanted wheat we have a new opening worthy of the most careful consideration. Experiments have not yet been made in this direction; but Prof. Grandeau, whose opinion I have asked on this subject, wrote to me that he believes the method must have a great future. Practical market-gardeners