238 ARID AGRICULTURE. 



highly cultivated rose or a wild one, a juicy, del- 

 icately flavored, seedless orange, or a small, bitter, 

 wilct crab apple, a loaf of white bread made of 

 improved wheat, or the rough cake of barley 

 bread, including the bran and husk, a diet of 

 experimentally bred and fed lamb or the coarse, 

 rough flesh of the wild boar ? 



In one of his papers, W. M. Hays says : "As 

 the breeding of sugar beets is worth to the world 

 tens of millions of dollars, so the breeding of 

 cereal, forage, fibre, and fruit crops will be 

 worth many billions." Mr. Hays himself pro- 

 duced a prolific wheat in Minnesota, which in-' 

 creased the agricultural wealth of that State by 

 an estimated ten millions of dollars per year. A 

 few years of corn breeding in Illinois, Iowa and 

 Missouri has doubled the corn crop of those 

 States, and the money values are so vast that if 

 stated the mind could not grasp their signifi- 

 cance. It has been a well recognized fact that 

 highly specialized plants like the sugar beets, or 

 pedigreed grains, can only be kept from deterior- 

 ating by continual selection, and on this account 

 their seeds are not generally produced by the 

 mass of growers. Seed raising and general plant 

 improvement has become a specialized business, 

 and the general farmer must continually renew 

 his seed from the best sources to meet with suc- 

 cess. Every improvement is of unmeasured 

 value to the producer and to the common weal th. 



