THE GUAM STATION AND ITS WORK. 507 



Among those vegetables that have been grown successfully are 

 beans, eggplants, radishes, okra, peppers, lettuce, cucumbers, musk- 

 melons, and watermelons. Beets grew quickly and had attained a 

 dimension of almost 2 inches in diameter when a lepidopterous larva 

 appeared upon the leaves' in such numbers as to completely riddle 

 Ihem before their presence was noted. It is evident, however, from 

 the behavior of this small plat of beets that they can be successfully 

 grown on the island. Cabbage failed to mature heads, but it is 

 believed that upon more suitable soil and with modified methods of 

 cultivation better success might be had. Improved varieties of the 

 tomato have not been successful. The plant has usually grown vigor- 

 ously, but fruit fails to set. The quality of the few fruits obtained 

 was a great improvement over that of the very small seedy native 

 variety, but the extreme light yield makes their production, based 

 upon such returns, impracticable. 



The work of introducing and testing the adaptability of new 

 varieties will be continued, and whenever varieties are found to 

 possess qualities making them specially valuable an effort will be 

 made to introduce them into general cultivation. Already some 

 interest has been shown in this work and many requests have been 

 received for seed of varieties grown at the station. Requests have 

 been specially numerous for seed of American varieties of eggplants 

 and watermelons, most of which are decided improvements over the 

 native varieties commonly cultivated on the island. 



GRAIN-STORING EXPERIMENTS. 



In Guam two conditions exist which prevent the storing of grains 

 in quantity for any considerable length of time. One of these is the 

 presence of the grain weevil, which attacks in large numbers and 

 completely ruins certain grains in a few days' time; the other is the 

 humid atmosphere, which keeps the grain damp and causes it to 

 decay. Corn is usually kept in earthenware jars, called tinajas, 

 which have a capacity of 5 or 6 gallons. During the wet season the 

 corn is poured out of these about twice a week onto mats made from 

 the leaves of the screw pine (Pandanus tector'ms) and allow^ed to 

 remain in the sun until the weevils are driven away by the heat and 

 the grain has had a chance to dry. During a wet day there may be 

 several showers interspersed with sunshine, and the necessity of car- 

 rying the corn to shelter and scattering it out again at every shower 

 renders the process most laborious. To provide a method of storing 

 grain permanently, and to eliminate all unnecessary handling, a 

 closed tank made of galvanized sheet iron, which is hermetically 

 sealed by the use of a heavy nonvolatile or slowly-volatile oil, has 

 been devised. The arrangement is simple. The tank is built air 



