| 78.55 | .40
Chilian Wheat |12.44| 9.45 | 67.80| 8.37 |1.30
Chilian Wheat |12.85| 8.65 | 71.60| 6.10 | .60
| |& bran | | |
Valparaiso Wheat |12.50| 14.55 | | |
French Wheat |13.20| 9.85 | 69.00| 7.65 | .30
Spanish Wheat |13.50| 10.30 | 68.90| 7.00 | .30
Canivano Wheat |11.33| 16.35 | 63.10| 6.50 |2.30
Canivano Wheat |11.15| 15.40 | 67.25| 5.70 | .60
ditto ditto (2nd grinding) |12.60| 18.70 | 67.00 |1.70
Hard wheat, grown near Malaga |10.87| 12.15 | 64.38| 12.60 |
| | | |& lactic acid
ditto ditto (2nd grinding) |10.00| 14.50 | 60.20| 15.30 |
----------------------------------+-----+-------+------+----
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There is no crop, the skilful and successful cultivation of which on the same soil, from generation to generation, requires more art than is demanded to produce good wheat.  To grow this grain on fresh land, adapted to the peculiar habits and wants of the plant is an easy task.  But such fields, except in rare instances, fail sooner or later to produce sound and healthy plants, which are little liable to attacks from the malady called “rust,” or which give lengthened ears or “heads,” well filled with plump seeds.

Having long resided in the best wheat-growing district in the Union, the writer has devoted years of study and observation to all the influences of soil, climate, and constitutional peculiarities, which affect this bread-bearing plant.  It is far more liable to smut, rust, and shrink in some soils than in others.  This is true in western New York, and every other section where wheat has long been cultivated.  As the alkalies and other fertilizing elements become exhausted in the virgin soils of America, its crops of wheat not only become smaller on an average, but the plants fail in constitutional vigor, and are more liable to diseases and attacks from parasites and destructive insects.  Defects in soil and improper nutrition lead to these disastrous results.  Soils are defective in the following particulars: 

1.  They lack soluble silica, or flint in an available form, with which to produce a hard glassy stem that will be little subject to “rust.”  Soluble flint is never very abundant in cultivated soils; and after they have been tilled some years, the supply is deficient in quantity.  It is not very difficult to learn with considerable accuracy the amount of silica which rain-water as it falls on the earth will dissolve out of 1,000 grains of soil in the course of eight or ten days.  Hot water will dissolve more than cold; and water charged with carbonic acid more than pure water which has been boiled.  The experiments of Prof.  Rogers of the University of Virginia, as published in Silliman’s