3l8 AGRICULTURE OF MAINE. 



warrant or guarantee either the description, the quality or the 

 productiveness of the goods it had for sale, would have to 

 take down its signs and close its offices in thirty days, after 

 announcing merely that it refused to guarantee the descriptions 

 which it give as accurate. Seedsmen make the claim that 

 they cannot be responsible for varieties because they do not 

 know their growlers. This of course simply means that they 

 should either go out of the seed business or grow the seed 

 themselves, buying only such seed, which for any reason they 

 cannot raise, from growers with unassailable reputations, and 

 it is part and parcel of the seed business, as of any other busi- 

 ness, to 'be equipped with men and means, that they may by a 

 frequent inspection know exactly the method pursued by their 

 growers, the constant rogueing or elimination of weak plants, 

 of plants diseased, and of plants other than the strain or vari- 

 ety being raised. That no seedsman can guarantee the number 

 of pounds or bushels to be produced goes without saying, but 

 there is no reason in the world why they cannot absolutely and 

 without qualification guarantee that when they take the farm- 

 er's money they will deliver exactly what he has ordered. Fur- 

 thermore, they can, without the slightest difficulty, deliver 

 healthy, plump, sure-to-grow seeds, free of dirt, and dead ones, 

 and as seed crops are gathered in the fall and not planted until 

 the spring, there is ample time to test for vitality or germinat- 

 ing ability every seed they ofifer for sale. 



Seed selection, even in its simplest form, is, as yet, strictly 

 in the infant class in the United States. Nevertheless, the 

 results already secured are so big that the slowest of "stand 

 pat" folks of the farming profession have been shown good 

 and plenty. Furthemiore, there are few men entitled to call 

 themselves farmers who haven't found out for themselves that 

 seed selected from vigorous, 'big yielding plants, will yield a 

 good dividend on the time and care spent in the selection. The 

 notion that beans are beans and potatoes are merely potatoes is 

 childish in the extreme. In a careful test of seventeen varie- 

 ties of potatoes, well known and each one a favorite, in some 

 section of the United States planted, cultivated and sprayed in 

 the same way, yielded in 1913, all the way from 70 bushels to 

 the acre to 423 bushels. This eye-opener was not conducted 

 in the usual method of a hill or two or small plot, but was an 



