In the instance where we had estimated as many as 1,568,000 plantain seeds to a bushel of clover seed, the seedsman admitted that he had put it with the clover at the rate of one pound of plantain to eleven pounds of clover, under the impression that it was a desirable pasture plant. Now this we know is often done; but is it not always charged for as clover in cases where it is used for adulteration? This matter, then, of dirty seed is clearly one of importance: it, however, only wants the farmer to become acquainted with the true form of clover seed to enable him to detect any admixture in this; and then, if he has this knowledge, so requisite for his well-doing, and steadily abstains from purchasing the nasty, however cheap, he will soon find that his seedsman will supply him with a genuine article, which, all things considered, will be even cheaper than the opposite. CHAPTER XXIII. ON THE PARASITES OF CLOVER. Of the truly parasitic plants affecting the clover crop, we have two genera—namely, _Cuscuta_ or Dodder, and _Orobanche_ or Broomrape. Both of these, some few years since, were comparatively rare as farm pests; but as they are probably more abundant on Continental than on our home farms, they are greatly increasing from the constant influx of foreign seeds. CUSCUTA—_Dodder_. Of the genus _Cuscuta_ we have two species of agricultural importance,—_Cuscuta epilinum_, the Flax Dodder, and _C. trifolii_, the Clover Dodder. In both, the plant itself consists of a mass of pink and yellowish tendrils, upon which are placed here and there compact bunches of flowers varying alike in colour. The whole plant, in both species, being entirely parasitic—that is, it lives wholly on the juices of its foster-parent,—it has no leaves of its own; still, however, the Dodder plant is in the first instance produced from seed, each flower being succeeded by a capsule containing two small wrinkled seeds, which, not being larger or lighter in the _C. epilinum_ than a linseed, or in the still smaller seed of the clover, in the case of the _C. trifolii_, the seed of flax or clover crops affected with dodder will never be entirely free from it: as an evidence of its large increase, we remember once seeing a crop of flax grown from Riga seed diminished about one-twentieth by the dodder; but on the seed so produced being sown in another field of the same farm, the crop of flax was well-nigh destroyed. Our friend Professor Voelcker had some seed of the flax dodder sent to him for analysis, the reason being that, as his correspondent had separated a great number of bushels of this weed pest from a single crop of flax, he was desirous of ascertaining whether it possessed any feeding properties or the reverse; and on this head it is satisfactory to learn that it is considered useless, though innocuous.