Alexandria Daily Advertiser

A NEW WHEAT.

The increasing ardour of the spirit of the gentlemen farmers of Ireland, has been exemplified in a very singular degree, at the cattle exhibition lately held in Dublin, by the unexampled demand for the new species of wheat which may be well considered a kind of phenomenon in the vegetable world. From its novelty in this country, it has not yet acquired any rank in any class of botanical classification, at least generally known or alluded to; but its properties, if the future effects shall invariably answer the first experiments in this country, will amply compensate all the expenses of its culture, as well as the original prime cost of the seed viz. ten guineas per stone.

The original seed imported by a servant of the late Thomas Whaley, Esq. on that gentleman's Jerusalem expedition, was first taken notice of by a Mr. Doran, of Francis street, an eminent experimental farmer and distiller. That gentleman's account of the various branches of his experiment, as communicated to the numerous crowds of admiring spectators of the sample he procured at the exhibition at the Duke of Leinster's, stands critically as follows; he sowed two tons and a half of wheat, in the space of an acre, at Clontarf, in the county of Dublin, in August after a previous crop of vetches; this seed he had dibbled by two men and four children, the whole expense of labour amounting to no more than 7s. British; in the last reaping season, it exhibited stalks of seven feet in length bent considerably at the top by the weight--a bunch of ears on an average from 42 to 45 in number, on a stalk, and each ear containing generally from 150 to 190 large round grains of wheat, almost transparent through a film, resembling a skin or husk; its color only approaches the land's wheat so well known in this country. The stalk from and into reeds filled with a white pulp, from their strength towards the root, were forced to have been cut about two feet from the surface of the soil. The straw or rather reed, Mr. Doran had cut and served as a substitute for oats, on which cattle greedily feed and seemed to thrive on it as well as on their usual food. The general produce of the wheat, respecting the seed was far beyond any other wheat; on grinding, the proportion of bran respecting the flour, was three pounds of the former, to one barrel of the latter.

Lon. Pap.