4 STURTEVANT S NOTES ON EDIBLE PLANTS 



Sturtevant wrote much on Indian com, contributing many short articles 

 on its culture on the farm and several long treatises on its botany and the 

 classification of its many varieties. Perhaps the most notable of the 

 scientific articles are in the Bulletin of the Torrey Botanical Society for 

 August, 1894, and Bulletin 57 on Varieties of Corn from the United States 

 Department of Agriculture. The last-named work is a monograph on 

 maize which is still the best authority on this valuable plant and a 

 permanent tide mark, as it were, to show Sturtevant's ability in working 

 up the history of cultivated plants. Besides setting forth the botany 

 of com, this bulletin describes 800 varieties, gives their synonyms and 

 establishes a scientific nomenclatiire for Indian com. The varieties are 

 placed in groups in accordance with their relationship, thvis giving to 

 scientist and farmer a classification of this immensely variable plant. 



To Sttirtevant is given the credit of having bmlt the first lysimeter 

 in America. This instrument, to measure the percolation of water through 

 a certain depth of soil, was put in on the Waushakum Farm in 1875. It 

 covered five-thousandths of an acre and meastired water percolations to 

 the depth of twenty-five inches. Records from the apparatus were kept 

 from late in 1875 to the beginning of 1880 a little more than four full 

 years. The results, presented in papers at several scientific meetings, and 

 freely discussed in the agricultural press, gave him high standing among 

 agricvdtviral experimenters in America. 



In spite of duties that must have claimed much of his time on Wausha- 

 kum Farm, Sturtevant foimd time to imdertake investigations in many 

 diverse fields of agriculture. As the years advanced, he put more 

 and more energy in the rapidly growing field of agricultviral research 

 until finally experimentation came to claim most of his attention. His 

 eminence in research on Waushakum Farm brought him many opportu- 

 nities to speak and write on agricultural affairs, in which work his facile 

 pen and ready speech greatly enhanced his reputation as an experimenter. 

 A natural outcome of his growth in the work he had chosen was that his 

 services shotild be sought in scientific institutions having to do with agri- 

 culture. In 1882, the Board of Control of the New York State Agricialtural 

 Experiment Station, located at Geneva, New York, selected him Director 

 of the Station, an institution just created by the State Legislature, and 

 asked him to organize the work. 



Perhaps Sturtevant was the more ready to give up Waushaktim Farm 

 and devote his whole time to scientific research for the reason that in 1879, 



