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SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. XXXVIII. No. 973 



improved tools and general farming im- 

 provements, regardless of better methods 

 of tillage whicli we know now obtain on 

 the farm, as against those which our fore- 

 fathers were able to accomplish, and all 

 regardless of hard work. It is all right for 

 the banker and the lawyer, and even some 

 professors, to berate the farmer for idle- 

 ness and inefficiency in methods and lack 

 of business, but I say let such men try to 

 raise wheat of high grade under the pres- 

 ent general understanding as laid down in 

 books, or by our best agriculturists. In 

 spite of all these directions, the wheat soon 

 becomes soft and shows all of the peculiar 

 characteristics which we find named in the 

 literature of the chemical laboratory, or in 

 the milling tests of wheat as previously 

 indicated, "white-bellied," "piebald," or 

 shrivelled, bleached and blistered, "black- 

 pointed," in fact all of the qualities of 

 deteriorated grain; and the chemist from 

 his laboratory outlook cries out "depleted 

 soils," "lost fertility," "bad physical tex- 

 ture," due to "worn-out humus," "lost 

 nitrogen, " " insufficient phosphates, ' ' 

 "lime," etc., forgetting, as it were, that 

 almost every field in these matters is a law 

 unto itself and that every one of these 

 fields in the next few years may contradict 

 all these assertions by the growth of splen- 

 did crops for reasons no one seems to know. 

 The expert agriculturist and agronomist, 

 who take their cue largely from the chem- 

 ists, cry out: "Give us intensified agricul- 

 ture," "Apply phosphates," "Apply 

 lime," "Apply potash," "Grow clover," 

 "Raise corn," "Eotate," all in a confused 

 jumble, and lately the bankers, afraid of 

 their mortgages, have become very busy 

 and tell how to farm and scold rather 

 strongly about lack of business methods on 

 the farm, berate the schools, etc. 



These conditions of farm cropping, 

 though not exclusively American, are espe- 



cially in prominence at present because 

 many of our most noted publicists are be- 

 coming, perhaps properly, alarmed. They 

 say our farmers show no ability of main- 

 taining the supply of wheat, the bread 

 grain, a permanent cropping element of 

 old land agriculture, but rather, instead, 

 are reaping lessened yields of poorer qual- 

 ity . from larger acreages. They are 

 strongly impressed with the fact that the 

 crop largely tends to disappear as a per- 

 manent factor in the agriculture of each 

 community, and this without much ap- 

 parent regard for the natural fertility of 

 any particular soil. It is thus hardly to 

 be looked upon with surprise that some of 

 our most noted educators and conserva- 

 tionists have become somewhat disturbed 

 and have rather loudly scolded the Amer- 

 ican farmer for supposed shiftlessness, in- 

 efficiency and lack of desire to do his work 

 in a regular way. Some have gone so far 

 as to call the farmer a "soil robber," for- 

 getting that the average farmer, like other 

 people, must live. Such men see the rapid 

 increase of population and the rapid ab- 

 sorption of the public domain and asso- 

 ciating these two existing facts with the 

 apparent thought that any intelligent man. 

 could raise wheat if only he would follow 

 out present best methods, begin to say 

 harsh things, each according to his own 

 individual make-up, forgetting, or per- 

 chance rather not seeing fully, that if he 

 should try hard to learn how best to grow 

 wheat, his mind would become confused 

 by the multiplicity of advisers and the 

 extreme variance of the explanations of 

 why he just as often fails as succeeds when 

 trying to foUow out a given method, as, 

 for example, of crop rotation, soil manur- 

 ing or soil tillage. 



The writer having grown up on the 

 farm, and never having allowed himself to 

 get away from the real love of working in 



