458 Canadian Record of Science. 
sugar-maker, but the leaves and collars make first rate cattle 
food. Sugar beets are propagated from seed entirely, which 
is-produced by the plant in the second year of its growth. 
The seed is sown early in the spring, in long drills, and 
now almost entirely by machinery. The drills are usually 
about eighteen inches apart and every year efforts are made 
to sow them closer, for the farmer as well as the manufactu- 
rer likes small and heavy beets rather than large and porous 
ones. 
In about a week’s time the small plants show themselves 
above the ground and all attention is paid to the thinning 
out. This is a delicate process which must be done by hand 
and on the proper performance of it everything depends. 
The plants are taken out so as to leave only one by itself, 
every eight or nine inches in the row, and children are found 
to be best adapted for the work. In the bect districts there 
is a continual struggle between the school authorities and 
the farmers as to who shall have the children in the spring 
time, and the school inspector usually has a hard time, for 
he has to contend with the parents and the children them- 
selves, as well. I have seen as many as fifty boys and girls 
working slowly across the fields in a long row, and in 
Bohemia often three times as many, all of whom ought by 
law to have been in school. And often have I seen a sudden 
stampede from the fields, led by the overseer himself, at the 
sight of a gendarme in the distance. In fact in my appren- 
ticeship days, I have several times found it very advisable 
to depart from the fields with more rapidity than dignity 
and to let the youngsters take care of themselves, which 
Bohemian children are well qualified to do. After the beets 
are thinned out the fields are left alone for afew days to 
allow the young plants to gather strength, and then the 
weeding and hoeing begin. This is done now almost en- 
tirely with machines drawn by horses, which keep turning 
up the ground and destroying the weeds between the rows, 
until the leaves of the beets get to be large and begin to 
cover the ground completely. Then they are left to them- 
selves till the fall, when in the latter end of September they 
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