experiments. All proved to be too frequently injurious to the seed 
to make it safe to trust to them — the oil of cloves the most injurious 
and the oil of wintergreen the least so. Solutions of less than 10 
percent strength were not used, however, and no trial was made of 
any milder form of application than soaking the seed for 5 minutes in 
an alcoholic solution of the oil. It is possible, consequently, that a sim- 
ple stirring into the seed of minimum quantities of a 5 or 10 percent 
solution, as in the case of the oil of lemon, might have been harm- 
less — excepting, however, the oil of cloves, which killed from 44 to 
100 percent of the kernels in each experiment. 
Carbolic Acid. — The action of carbolic acid was tested by soaking 
seed-corn from 5 to 30 minutes in solutions of the commercial acid 
in water, varying in strength from 2 to 30 percent. No injury was 
done by either 2 or 5 percent solutions applied to lots of 200 kernels 
each for 5, 10, 20, or 30 minutes, but the 10 and 30 percent solutions 
killed virtually all the seed even when applied for only 5 minutes. In 
our subsequent field experiments a 3 percent solution only was used, 
and then at the rate of 3 ounces of the solution to a gallon of corn. 
Formalin. — A few experiments made with formaldehyde, in water 
solutions of 4 percent, 25 percent, and 50 percent, showed that at 4 
percent Hiis substance was harmless to seed-corn soaked in it for 
any period between 5 minutes and half an hour. Two hundred ker- 
nels thus treated gave a germination ratio of 94 percent. The plants 
which grew, on the other hand, averaged only 4% inches at a time 
when the single check of 50 plants averaged 6 inches. The higher 
strengths mentioned were both extremely injurious, the 25 percent 
mixture killing from one fourth to four fifths of the seed, according 
to the period of use, and the 50 percent mixture, applied for half an 
hour, killing it all. 
The Alcohols. — To distinguish between the effects of alcohol and 
oils in some of the above mixtures, 200 kernels were soaked in com- 
mon alcohol for periods ranging from 5 minutes to half an hour, 
and 200 more in wood alcohol from 5 minutes to an hour, with the 
result that no injury was done except by the longer periods of treat- 
ment. From 98 to 100 percent of the grains grew after soaking 10 
or 20 minutes in ordinary alcohol, but only 66 percent after 30 minutes' 
treatment ; and 95 percent grew after 5 or 10 minutes in wood alcohol, 
but only 74 percent after 20 minutes and 14 percent after an hour. 
From this it may be inferred that seed-corn is uninjured by as much 
as 10 minutes' soaking in either kind of alcohol, but that more than 
this is dangerous, and that injury will begin to appear after 20 or 30 
minutes' treatment — sooner if the solvent is wood alcohol. 
Lysol. — This highly odoriferous coal-tar product was applied to 
seed-corn in twenty-one lots of 50 kernels each, and in aqueous solu- 
tions of 1 percent, 2 percent, 5 percent, and 10 percent, the corn 
being soaked in each of these 5 minutes, 10 minutes, 20 minutes, and 
1 and 2 hours. Another lot of corn was soaked for 5 minutes in pure 
lysol, and lysol was applied to seed-corn at the rate of half an ounce 
