corn becomes specially liable to be affected with disease. Duhamel treated this belief with scorn, as a mere vulgar prejudice; other scientific writers have followed in his wake; and Dr. Greville, in an elaborate work on Cryptogamia, proved, satisfactorily enough, that the mildew so often found on the barberry (and which, under the microscope, presents an extraordinarily beautiful appearance) is distinctly different from any of the fungi usually found on diseased corn; but nevertheless, practical agriculturists, both in this country and in America, still maintain the popular notion on the subject to be an incontrovertible fact. A most intelligent farmer assured the writer that on one occasion, when going over his fields with a friend, they were struck with the odd appearance of a semicircular patch of wheat being all blighted with “rust,” while the rest of the field was wholly unaffected by the disease. As it was at the edge of the field, the friend remarked that it would be as well to examine the hedge close by, when a barberry-bush, the only one in the neighbourhood, was discovered growing exactly opposite the centre of the diseased patch. It was grubbed up, and in succeeding years no more “rust” appeared in the field. Had science, instead of denying this singular influence of one plant upon another (testified to, as it is, by many witnesses), addressed itself more carefully to seeking out the cause of it, we should probably not be left now to guesses upon the subject; but as, in the present uncertainty, even a “guess at truth” may be of some interest, the following considerations are adduced.
The barberry is a sensitive plant, endowed apparently with something analogous to the nervous system of animals; for its blossoms offer a noted specimen of vegetable irritability, easily excited by the insertion of a pin—the stamens, if lightly touched at their base, springing forward and striking against the stigma, while the petals at the same time close over them. If the anthers be ripe, this movement causes them to discharge their pollen upon the stigma, and then, if touched again, no result is elicited; but if the blossom be immature, the various parts soon return to their former position, and another touch excites a similar commotion again, so that the experiment may be repeated several times upon the same flower. Nor is this all: for it has been further found that if poison be applied to the plant, should it be of a corrosive nature (such as arsenic), the filaments stiffen into a rigidity no longer capable of responding to the touch which was before so irritating; whereas if, on the contrary, a narcotic, such as opium, be administered, they equally lose the power of making an active spring, but droop in flaccid weakness, easily bent in any direction. As regards their ordinary condition, however, it would appear that some external force must be necessary in order to impel the stamens to discharge their office of fructifying the central organ; but as experimentalising botanists are not always at hand to tickle them into compliance, Nature has provided for their being commonly urged into fulfilling her behests, by making the flowers specially attractive to insects—it may be, even by that very odour so offensive to human nostrils,—and the busy tribes thus drawn to settle on them, in pushing their way among the irritable stamens, soon vex them into that violent rush towards the pistil which is requisite to induce its fructification. Further consequences ensue from this peculiar endowment: for just as “where the body is, there the eagles gather together,” so, and for like reason, where insects are, there little birds are sure to flock; and though the fruit is too acid to tempt them into making that an article of diet, singing birds, especially bull and goldfinches, are especially fond of resorting to the barberry-bush, to build their nests in its thorn-protected branches, and profit by the feast provided in its swarms of insect visitants. This of itself would suffice to make the plant unwelcome to those short-sighted cultivators who hold the feathered race in deadly hatred as devourers of their grain, hearing in their sweetest songs only the impudent triumph of successful plunderers; but this is a prejudice abandoned by the more enlightened, who recognise the destruction of many insects as a service outweighing the consumption of a few seeds. But, however the plant might have been forgiven for harbouring birds—now acknowledged to be harmless or even useful—it is less easy to pardon its attractiveness to the lesser winged guests which allure them, and which are by no means proved to be innocuous to crops: for, indeed, it seems no unplausible theory that among the atomic crowd drawn together by the fascinations of the barberry blossoms, may be some minute agent of a blight in corn, which, when it finds itself in proximity to a more congenial abode, may abandon its first resting-place on the shrub to effect a more pernicious lodgment in the grain. If this theory be correct, the old opinion of the barberry being injurious to corn, scoffed at as a mere superstition when set forth as the subtle and inexplicable working of a sort of vegetable feud, might be admitted and recognised as the reasonable outcome of a chain of simple natural causes.
By divesting it of its lower branches, and carefully removing all the suckers which it so liberally throws up, the barberry may be diverted from its natural bush-like growth, and made to assume a tree-like form; a change which improves not only its appearance but even its produce, since, when its strength is spent in sending up many shoots, the berries are comparatively small and few in number. Those of the ordinary barberry, of a long oval in shape, contain two or even sometimes three seeds; but a variety, more common in Normandy perhaps than anywhere else, entirely devoid of seeds, and more highly prized wherever it is grown than any other kind, is made by the confectioners of Rome into a celebrated sweetmeat known as Confiture d’Epine vinette—this French name for the barberry signifying acid, or sorrel-thorn. As this seedless sort of fruit is found only as the growth of poor soil, or on old plants, and even then it does not seem to be a permanent characteristic—since though the kind can be propagated by layers or cuttings, suckers taken from such bushes always, it is said, produce the common seeded berries; it is generally supposed that this sterile fruit is only a mark of weakness in the plant that bears it, rather than that its production