THE WHEAT PROBLEM AGAIN. 759 



energies of a carefully guarded community. Cottages, each with its 

 house mother, would insure that sense of home, and that affectionate 

 and sympathetic oversight so essential to this society composed of 

 those who are always children, while measures, which science has 

 already pointed out and experience proved as advisable, might, if pro- 

 tected by wise legislation, permit less vigilance on the part of care- 

 takers and consequent happiness because of greater freedom to its 

 members. 



It is a happy coincidence that Massachusetts, the pioneer State in 

 the work among the feeble-minded, should in its fifty-first year cele- 

 brate the beginning of its second half century by the inauguration of 

 this most eventful step in the onward progress of the work. The 

 training school at Waltham has lately purchased sixteen hundred and 

 sixty acres of land for the establishment of a colony which is to have 

 natural and healthful growth from the fostering care of the parent 

 institution. 



As these colonies increase, drawing from society a pernicious ele- 

 ment and transforming it under watchful care into healthful growth, 

 may not in time the national Government, finding these homes of 

 prevention a more excellent way than prison houses of cure for ill, be 

 induced to provide a national colony for this race more to be com- 

 miserated because of a childhood more hopeless than that of the two 

 others in our midst on whom so much has been expended? 



THE WHEAT PROBLEM AGAIN. 



By EDWARD ATKINSON. 



IN a recent article in the North American Review, Mr. John Hyde, 

 the statistician of the United States Department of Agriculture, 

 a gentleman of very high authority and repute, presents this problem 

 in such terms as to throw a doubt upon the validity of any forecast 

 of the potential increase in the product of wheat, or, in fact, of any 

 crop in this country. Without referring to myself by name, he yet 

 makes it very plain that he does not attach any value to my recent 

 forecast of wheat production printed in the Popular Science Monthly 

 for December, 1898. 



On the other hand, he rightly says that since Tyndall's address to 

 the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1874 no 

 treatise presented to that association has excited so general an interest 

 or provoked so much unfavorable criticism as Sir William Crookes's 

 recent utterances on the subject of the approaching scarcity in the 

 supply of wheat. 



