THE NEW EARTH 



attention. So, in the schools where agriculture 

 is now taught, no closer attention is paid to 

 any one subject than to that of the weeds of 

 the earth. The students are taught how to tell 

 the weeds on sight, all about their botanical 

 construction, their life-history, how powerfully 

 they work to take nutriment away from the 

 soil. Weeds of every kind in the locality are 

 brought to the class. Not only are they studied 

 with as great care as the beneficent plants of 

 the garden, the hothouse and the field, but 

 the student must be able accurately to name 

 and designate them merely by their seeds, 

 branches or leaves. Given a handful of leaves, 

 or branches, or seeds, scores of kinds among 

 them, he must be able to construct from them 

 the entire list of plants, much as a paleontolo- 

 gist reconstructs a pre-historic animal from 

 a broken tooth embedded in the rocks for 

 numberless ages. Much is learned, too, about 

 the practical side of the question, based upon 

 scientific exactness. The students are shown 

 on due authority that the weeds in a given 

 crop may easily reduce the yield of the crop 

 by fifty per cent simply by taking from the 

 soil the nutriment the crop is entitled to and 



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