to six or seven inches; thus extending it on your lower
floor, turning it more frequently, as the growth is rapid. The
vegetation of the grain, together with the turning, will by this time
make the watering pot necessary; the criterion by which you will judge
of its fitness for the water, is as soon as you perceive the root or
acrospire begins to wither. Two thirds of your water is to be
distributed over the surface of your couch for the first watering,
which will require thirty-two gallons, and when turned back again,
sixteen gallons for the second watering, making in the whole
forty-eight gallons of water to sixty bushels of corn. This water
should be put on with a gardener's watering pot, as equally as
possible. Supposing this pot to contain four gallons, it will make
eight pots for the first watering, and four for the second. In this
stage of the operation the turnings on the floor should be very
frequent, in order to keep the grain cool, as the heat of the weather,
at this season, will be sufficient to promote and perfect the
vegetation. The second day after the first watering, if the blade is
not sufficiently grown, water again, but in less quantity, say one
half. It will be now four or five days more before the couch is ready
for the kiln, which will be ascertained by the blade becoming the full
length of the corn. After this it should be thrown on the upper floor,
and suffered to wither for a couple of days, turning it frequently; by
this time the blade will have a yellow appearance, the grain will
become tender, and, if tasted, be found uncommonly sweet; in this state
it may be committed to the kiln, and dried in the usual way.

N. B. It will generally take ten days after it is out of the steep to
perfect the malting of southern corn, and twelve days for northern.

_Fermentation._

Notwithstanding that progress of improvement in the doctrine of
fermentation has, in the last twenty years, far surpassed any thing in
the same period that preceded it, we have still much to learn.
Fermentation is the instrument or means which nature employs in the
decomposition of vegetable and animal bodies, or reduction of them to
their original elements, or first principles. Fermentation is,
therefore, a spontaneous separation of the component parts of these
bodies, and is one of those processes that is conducted by nature for
their resolution, and the combination and fermentation of other bodies
out of them; therefor