Excerpt from Grasses Forage La Plants: A Practical Treatise Comprising Their Natural History; Comparative Nutritive Value; Methods of Cultivating, Cutting, and Curing; And the Management of Grass Lands in the United, States and British Provinces I propose to speak of the grasses, a family of plants the most extensive and the most beautiful, as well as the most important to mankind. It embraces nearly a sixth part of the whole vegetable kingdom; it Clothes the globe with perpetual verdure, or adorns it at fixed seasons with a thick matted carpet of green, none the less beautiful for its Simplicity; and it nourishes and sustains by far the greater part of the animals that serve us and minister to our wants. When we consider the character of our climate, and the necessity that exists, throughout all the northern and middle portions of the United States and the Cana das, of stall-feeding from three to five or six months of the year, for means of which we are dependent mainly on the grasses, it is plain that, in an economical point of view, this subject is one of the most important that can occupy the farmer's attention. The annual value of the grass crop to the country, for pasturage and hay together, cannot be less than three hundred million dollars, to say nothing of a vast amount of roots and other plants cultivated and used as forage crops. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.