258 THE NEW AGRICULTURE. 



transportation facilities, making it possible to send farm prod- 

 ucts at a profit to markets however distant ; the mighty move- 

 ments of immigration which within half a lifetime occupied 

 practically all the arable land throughout the thousand-mile 

 valleys of the Mississippi and the Missouri rivers, developing 

 vast systems of irrigation in the semi-arid regions, becoming 

 the children of the morning on the Pacific Slope, since beyond 

 them or behind them was alike East ; the vigorous and highly 

 efficient work of the Department of Agriculture and the Ex- 

 periment Stations of the several states these are among the 

 basic factors which have tended to inaugurate and accelerate 

 the new practice in agriculture. 



The old remedies recommended to the farmer for combat- 

 ing the diseases of his animals and plants would hardly com- 

 mand attention to-day. It has not been so many years ago 

 that an influential paper, The New England Farmer, recom- 

 mended as follows for bot-fly on horses : "Scrape the eggs 

 off every ten days with a sharp knife, let out the blood over 

 the jugular vein, and use mild oils freely." In the Memoirs 

 of the Board of Agriculture, State of New York, may be 

 found, for caterpillars on trees : "Bore a hole into the tree 

 about six inches deep and fill it with sulphur, a remedy which 

 is said to have never failed." A prize essay published by the 

 New York State Agricultural Society declares that for wheat 

 midge nothing can equal "fumigation with sulphur, or smoke 

 from any material. All pungent odors," says the essayist, 

 "are offensive to the gram fly, as they are to the mosquito, and 

 that most offensive of all odors, the one proceeding from the 

 skunk, has been tested and highly recommended as a pre- 

 ventive." 



Throughout the early career of our older farmers the bind- 



