200 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. [Jan., 



can be grown two or three hundred miles north of the orange 

 belt in Florida, which can be grown as far north, for instance, 

 as Memphis, Tenn. These oranges, some of them, make 

 particularly good lemonade, and there is a great demand all 

 over the South by the farmers for these oranges in their door 

 yards, for family purposes, to take the place largely of lemons. 



Other lines of work have been inaugurated in the South in 

 the way of improvement of cotton. We have a number of 

 breeding farms for this purpose in South Carolina and in 

 Georgia, in Mississippi, and in Texas. In Texas the work is 

 particularly interesting, or has been, especially in the last two 

 or three years, on account of the attacks of the boll weevil 

 upon the cotton. This insect seemed likely at one time to 

 largely injure the cotton crop in Texas. It has been found by 

 the selection of early varieties, and by the selection of plants 

 which are resistant of the boll weevil, a strain can be de- 

 veloped which is in a large part immune to the attacks of the 

 boll weevil. In fact, this is one of the most interesting things 

 we have developed in recent years, and this work is very sug- 

 gestive of what may be accomplished in the line of growing 

 strains of different crops which are immune to insect attacks. 

 In the case of the cotton it has been found, so far as the boll 

 weevil is concerned, that certain plants are not attacked by 

 the boll weevil in the general manner in which the majority 

 of plants are destroyed. By saving the seed from these plants 

 which appear to be partly immune, and sowing it the following 

 season, an immune strain is being secured, a strain which can 

 be planted earlier, and which apparently resists the attack of 

 the insect. So that in the case of cotton, and also to a less 

 extent with some other general farm crops, strains are being 

 developed which are comparatively immune to these attacks 

 from destructive insects, or partly so at least. 



Take it in the case of tobacco ; in North Carolina and South 

 Carolina, where thousands of acres have been destroyed this 

 last season, we found, on examination, certain individual 



