74. CARUM Carui. CARAWAY SEEDS.--The seeds of this are in demand both by
druggists and confectioners. It is cultivated in Kent and Essex; where
it, being a biennial plant, is sown with a crop of spring corn, and left
with the stubble during the succeeding winter, and after clearing the
land in the spring is left to go to seed. It requires a good hot dry
soil; but although the crop is often of great value, it so much exhausts
the land as to be hazardous culture in many light soils where the
dunghill is not handy.

The seed is about ten pounds per acre, and the crop often five or six
sacks.

75. CORIANDRUM sativum. CORIANDER.--Is grown in the stiff lands, in
Essex, and is an annual of easy but not of general culture. The seeds
are used by druggists and rectifiers of spirits, and form many of the
cordial drinks.

The quantity of seed and produce are similar to those of Caraway.

76. ERVUM Lens. LENTILS.--Once cultivated here for the seeds, which are
used for soups; but it is furnished principally from Spain, and can at
all times be purchased for less than it can be grown for.

77. HORDEUM distichon. COMMON TWO-ROWED BARLEY.--A grain now in very
general cultivation, and supposed to be the best kind grown for malting.
The season for sowing barley is in the spring, and the crop varies
according to soil and culture; it is sown either broad-cast, drilled, or
dibbled. The quantity of seed sown is from three pecks to three bushels
per acre, and the produce from three to eleven quarters.

As the process of malting may not be generally understood by that class
of readers for which this work is mostly intended, I shall give a short
sketch of it.--It is a natural principle of vegetation, that every seed
undergoes a change before it is formed into the young plant. The
substance of the cotyledons, which when ground forms the nutritious
flower of which bread is made, changes into two particular substances,
i. e. sugar and mucilage; and whilst mankind form from it the principal
staff of life as an edible commodity, the same parts of the seed in
barley are by certain means made into malt, which is only another term
for the sugar of that grain. To effect this, the barley is steeped in
water, and afterwards laid in heaps, in which state it vegetates in a
few days, and the saccharine fermentation is by that means carried on to
a certain pitch, when it is put on a kiln to which a fire is applied,
and it is by that means