DAIRY AND SEED IMPROVEMENT MEETINGS. 365 



Student of potato varieties all his life — Prof. Stuart of Cornell 

 and of the United States Department of Agriculture. Prof. Stuart 

 has been doing experiment work with varieties for the United 

 States Department of Agriculture, and he has made a very 

 extensive study of the chairacteristics of varieties. Probably no 

 man in the country is better qualified to set a varietal standard 

 for potatoes than Prof. Stuart. It was the vote of the associa- 

 tion last year that we do something towards standardization. 

 The report which I gave yesterday will be published in our 

 annual report and will be available to any farmer in the State 

 of Maine who makes application for it through the Department 

 of Agriculture. 



I think that we should, as growers, take the potatoes which 

 we know — for instance, the Cobbler variety, and we want to so 

 set a picture of the Cobbler plant in our mind that when we go 

 to some other town, or to our neighbor's farm, we can pick out 

 that plant and say for a certainty that it is a Cobbler. We want 

 to be able to recognize the Cobbler in comparison with the Sir 

 Walter Raleigh or some other purple stemmed and purple flow- 

 ered variety. 



Another thing, — each individual plant has some characteristic 

 of its own. For instance, in the Green Mountain Group we 

 have the Gold Coin, the Carman Number i, the Norcross and a 

 host of other varieties, all of the one type. The individual 

 variety in the type is not important, but we must give ourselves 

 a type for any one group and then stick to it. The same thing 

 is true with corn and grain. I have been speaking particularly 

 of potatoes because we have done mostly potato certification 

 work this year. My remarks are as true with other farm crops 

 as with potatoes. I hope this association will continue its cer- 

 tification work, and that the certification work will grow and 

 spread until we are taking in all the crops grown by all mem- 

 bers who make a business of growing seed. 



I have already said a little something about the inspection 

 methods, and I am going to explain more in detail how we 

 managed the work this year. We asked the men who wished to 

 have inspection made with the idea of certification, to select 

 the best seed available in the first place, and then to treat that 

 seed with formaldehyde or corrosive sublimate to kill all the 

 spores or germs or blackleg on the outside of the potato. While 



