602 ANNUAL. REPORT OF THE Off. Doc. 



before freezing weather and thoroughly dried, the vitality will be 

 destroyed. Another reason whj^ selection from the crib is not the 

 best is: you will look into the crib and see some goodlooking ears. 

 You do not know anything about that ear. You do not know whether 

 it grew on a stalk in a hill by itself, or whether it grew with other 

 stalks. What you want to do is to get for seed corn, the corn that 

 will do the best in the environment in which you expect to plant 

 it, and you know by experiment that the standing quality of that 

 corn is hereditary. It has been sufficiently proven that a large per- 

 centage of stalks that have fallen down produce the same kind, 

 while stalks that stand up before the wind produce their kind. 

 Now, In selecting out of the crib, you do not know anything of the 

 conditions under which this corn grew. If you select the corn for 

 seed before harvest, you will be able to see under what conditions 

 it grew and select it from a good stalk. You should see that the 

 stalks are good, that the ears have a good appearance, are well 

 filled out, have good tips, and in fact, have all the points men- 

 tioned in the score card. These ears selected from the field do 

 not always have the good appearance of the ears selected from 

 the crib on their appearance alone, and yet experiments for two 

 consecutive years showed an increase over those selected from the 

 crib. And the same thing applies to the potato. If you want to 

 keep up the quality of your potato crop you will select your seed 

 potatoes from the hill rather than from the cellar. In selecting 

 from the cellar, you don't know in what kind of a hill that potato 

 grew, whether it was one potato on a vine, or whether it was one 

 of many, or even whether it was the one big potato among a lot 

 of little ones on the same vine. Consequently, selection from the 

 field is best to follow, for educational value as well as for the greater 

 possibility of excellence of material and yield, and with that I 

 shall close. 



BALANCED KATIONS FOR CATTLE. 



By DR. H. P. ARM.-BY, State College, Pa. 



M'r. President, and Gentlemen of the Association: It is a very 

 great pleasure to me to be here and meet this large gathering of 

 the Stock Breeders of Pennsylvania, and to learn of the very in- 

 teresting meetings which I understand you had yesterday. When 

 I left home yesterday, the thermometer was down somewhere 

 about zero, but as soon as we came across the mountain, and ap- 

 proached Pittsburg, it began to grow warmer, and I understand 

 now that it was the warmth engendered by your Society yesterday. 

 My subject is an old one, but I hope to suggest at least a little 

 modification in one way of looking at it. I shall consider it espec- 

 ially in its relation to the feeding of beef cattle. 



We all know in a general way what is meant by a balanced ration 

 but we shall, perhaps ^o^t a little more definite understanding of it 

 if we consider how the animal machine which we term the body 

 works. We are aware that the working machinery of the body is 

 composed of what the chemist calls '^protein." Now if I were wise 

 enough I could stand here all the morning and tell you what the 

 chemist knows about protein, but for our present purpose it is 



