530 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



gaining control over the powers of nature through redirection of the 

 vital energy of the plants along more useful lines directed toward ends 

 of human welfare. The control is collective no less than individual: 

 Native plants vary, and the fitter survive ; Darwin noted the increasing 

 variation of plants under domestication, and thereby detected a natural 

 law of increasing plasticity of types ; and now under the law variability 

 is accelerated and the fitter forms are selected and multiplied, so that 

 the efficiency of crops is increased. Under natural conditions, plants 

 spread slowly and with the tediousness of unlimited time adjusted them- 

 selves to particular soils and climates; with settlement, pioneers intro- 

 duced new plants which were often found fitter than those of native 

 growth ; now the plains and mountains of the world are scoured to find 

 types adapted to less productive districts, and thereby the efficiency of 

 entire floras is increasing. And the end is not yet. Agriculture began 

 with the accidental dropping of seeds in accidentally fertilized spots; 

 in time the middens were expanded into gardens and these into fields; 

 and now plain common sense and reasonable foresight look to the exten- 

 sion of planting and cultivating and cropping over all the humid 

 country and so far into the arid lands as complete utilization of the 

 scant waters will permit. Our 3,000,000 square miles or 2,000,000,000 

 acres, now sustain about 90,000,000 inhabitants, or 30 per square mile, 

 and our exports of food-stuffs are falling off; within 65 years the 

 population will doubtless double, and by the end of the century it will 

 treble — yet the 250,000,000 mouths must not only be fully fed, but a 

 margin of food-stuffs for export must be left over if prosperity is to 

 persist. To attain this end, plant efficiency must be increased; not only 

 must two heads of wheat be made to grow where a blade of grass grew 

 before, but each square rod must be made to yield a bushel instead of a 

 peck of grain, and more nutritious grains must be invented and created 

 and kept employed in converting the crude ore of lower nature into the 

 coin of individual and national welfare. It is no longer enough to 

 know the plants and vital processes of nature; it is becoming necessary 

 so to redirect nature as to produce more efficient plants by improving 

 the vital processes — and this is a current duty of the Bureau of Plant 

 Industry. 



Even more plastic than plants are the faunal forms, both wild and 

 domesticated; and before history began, kine and swine and sheep and 

 fowls were so far artificialized by selection and breeding that the 

 ancestral forms were obscured. It is the business of the Biological 

 Survey and Bureau of Entomology to investigate the native fauna and 

 classify the forms, technically into orders and genera and species and 

 practically into useful and injurious — and then to perpetuate the good 

 and reform or extirpate the evil, operating largely through the vital 

 forces of the organisms themselves; and the world is scoured for 



