This may be inferred from the fact that some of the flats have been in Indian corn every year for forty or fifty years, without manure, and with good cultivation have seldom produced less than sixty bushels per acre, and with extra cultivation from eighty to ninety bushels have been obtained.

In case of need, the stalks would furnish a large amount of good food for cattle.  They are full of leaves which are nutritive, and whether cut and dried for winter, or eaten green by stock turned on the ground where they grow, would be very valuable in case of deficiency of grass.

Messrs. Van Eppes employ twenty hands during the summer; and in autumn, when the brush is being gathered and prepared, they have nearly a hundred, male and female.  They are mostly Germans, who come to Schenectady with their families during the broom corn harvest, and leave when it is over.

The manufacture of brooms is carried on mostly in the winter season.  The quantity usually turned out by Messrs. Van Eppes is 150,000 dozen per annum.—­("Albany Cultivator.”)

CHENOPODIUM QUINOA.

About twenty-eight years ago this plant was introduced into Britain from Peru, where the seeds are used as food, under the name of petty rice.  Attention was drawn to it by Loudon, in his “Gardener’s Magazine,” in 1834, and in 1836 it was cultivated on a large scale by Sir Charles Lemon.  This plant and the lentil are two of the most promising exotics that have been recommended for field culture.  There are two varieties of quinoa, the white and the red seeded; the red has bitter properties, and is only used for medicine.  In North America the seeds of the former are used as a substitute for maize and the potato.  A white meal is obtained from it, having a tinge of yellow.  It contains scarcely any gluten, but, like oatmeal, makes very good porridge and cakes.  Its nutritive qualities are proved by the analysis of Dr. Voelcker ("Journal of Agriculture of Scotland,” October, 1850), which states it to yield 3.66 per cent. of nitrogen, equal to 2.87 per cent. of protein compounds.  In this respect the meal appears to be superior to rye, barley, rice, maize, the plantain, and potato.  It has long furnished the food of millions in South America; and in Scotland and Ireland the plant would find a congenial climate and rich soil.

FUNDI OR FUNDUNGI.

This is an hitherto undescribed species of African grain (probably the Paspalum exile), much cultivated and esteemed in Sierra Leone, and other places on the African coast, where it is known by the Foulahs, Joloffs, and other native tribes, under the local name of Hungry rice.  It is a slender grass with digitate spikes, which have much of the habit of Digitaria, but which, on account of the absence of the small outer glume existing in that genus, Mr. Keppist, Librarian of the Linnean Society, of London, refers to Paspalum.  It produces a semi-transparent cordiform grain, about the size of a mignionette seed; the ear consists of two conjugate spikes, the grain being arranged on the outer edge of either spike, and alternated; they are attached by a peduncle to the husk.  The epicarp, or outer membrane, is slightly rugous.