THIRD ANNUAL YEAR BOOK — PART VI. 285 



BREEDING CLOVER. 



Twentieth Century Farmer. 

 The aggregate value that has come from improvement of live stock 

 and plants is so great that there can hardly be any adequate conception 

 of it. A large part of the wealth of the agricultural world can be traced 

 to this source. Never have efforts been as great or activity so marked as 

 at the present time. If the man who causes two blades of grass to grow 

 in place of one adds to his own and his country's wealth, then Prof. De 

 Vries of the Amsterdam university, Holland, has earned the right to be 

 called the benefactor of the agricultural world by breeding a clover that 

 uniform ily has five leaves on each clover stem instead of three, the usual 

 number. He has accomplished this by a process of selection and isolation 

 carried on for a period of ten years. 



It is a common belief that the finding of a four-leaf clover is an aus- 

 picious event and will bring good fortune to the possessor. Five-leaf 

 cloVers and even six leaves are sometimes found. Prof. De Vries found 

 some of these and carefully transplanted them to a greenhouse. After 

 careful breeding for a number of years he got seed enough to begin field 

 culture. So from this beginning the farmers of Holland now raise crops of 

 the five-leaf clover. The leaves of clover are the part that have no waste 

 and are richer in food elements than the clover stems. In the new five-leaf 

 there are no more stems than there were in three-leaf, so in that part 

 there is two-fifths gain. 



Prof. De Vries has put in ten years of his life on what would seem a 

 small thing, but the results show that his labors have been of great value 

 to the world. This is only one of the numerous experiments in plant 

 breeding that are in progress at all our experiment stations. We shall 

 expect that the result of these studies of plant life will result in the future, 

 as they have in the past, in increased crop production by breeding plants 

 that will give a larger yield and those that will better flourish in our 

 climate. 



E. RAPE. 



THE PLACE FOR DWARF ESSEX RAPE ON THE FARM. 



Wallaces' Farmer. 



What is Dwarf Essex Rape? 



It is a plant of the cabbage brossica family; not a common cabbage, 

 however, but a turnip that does not have any turnip on the root, but puts 

 its substance wholly in the stock and leaves. It is a biennial like the cab- 

 bage and turnip, which grows one year and lives over winter in climates 



