December 20, 1893.] 



Garden and Forest. 



521 



GARDEN AND FOREST. 



PUBLISHED WEEKLY BY 



THE GARDEN AND FOREST PUBLISHING CO. 



Office : Tribune Building, New York. 



Conducted by Professor C. S. Sargent. 



ENTERED AS SECOND-CLASS MATTER AT THE POST OFFICE AT NEW YORK, N. Y. 



NEW YORK, WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 20, 1893. 



TABLE OF CONTENTS. 



PAGE. 



Editorial Articies:— Our Experiment Stations and their Work 52 r 



Plants Recently Discovered in Northern China 522 



Composition in Landscape-art H. A. Ca/>arn. 522 



American Parlts : Mount Royal, Montreal Mrs. J. H. Rabbins. 523 



Notes on some Texas Trees y. Reverchoti. 524 



Notes on the Forest Flora of Japan.— XXVL (With figure.) C 5. 5. 524 



Cultural Department : — Plums for the Cold North T. S. Hoskins, M.D. 526 



Small Greenhouses y. N. Gerard. 526 



Lselia furfuracea IV. IV. 527 



Oncidium Gravesianum, The Orchid-weevil E. O. Orfiel. 527 



Cosmos hybridus IVvt. S. dark. 528 



Correspondence : — Climbin'; Roses in California H. C. Prait. 528 



Elseagnus hortensis in Dakota L. C. Corbett. 528 



The Catalpa in Kansas Gearge W. Tincher, 528 



Meetings of Societies: — Annual Meetingofthe American Forestry Association. 529 



Recent Publications 529 



Notes 530 



Illustration : — Larix Dahurica, var. Japonica, on Iturup, one of the Kurile 



Islands, Fig. 76 525 



Our Experiment Stations and their Work. 



WE have just received from the office of Experiment 

 Stations, at Washington, Bulletin No. 15, entitled 

 "The Handbook of Experiment-station Work," which was 

 prepared as a part of the exhibit of the office for the World's 

 Colutnbian Exposition. The bulletin, which contains more 

 than four hundred closely printed pages, is a popular digest 

 of the publications of the agricultural experiment stations 

 of the United States since their foundation. The topics are 

 arranged alphabetically, and while the book does not pre- 

 tend to be in any sense an encyclopaedia of agriculture, 

 still the number of its titles, the care which has been used 

 in summarizing the original investigations and the useful 

 compilations of the station bulletins make it a very conve- 

 nient and valuable work of reference. One cannot exam- 

 ine the book without feeling a respect for the stations and 

 their work, and being confirmed in the assurance that these 

 institutions are destined to exert a potent and wholesome 

 influence upon the agriculture and horticulture of the 

 country. 



The book makes clear, however, that in some ways there 

 has been considerable misdirected effort on the part of the 

 stations. When we are referred, for example, to more than 

 a hundred bulletins in various states, which give compara- 

 tive tests of different kinds of Strawberries, and reflect how 

 much time and labor all this cultivating and comparing and 

 recording and publishing has cost, it seems pretty clear that 

 no adequate scientific or practical return can be hoped for 

 from such an outlay. If the record of all the work in test- 

 ing varieties of Strawberries by the stations were blotted 

 out, the loss to the science and practice of horticulture 

 would be comparatively trifling. What we have before in- 

 sisted upon, is that the skilled workers in the stations can 

 devote their time and energies to more fruitful fields of 

 labor, and especially to work which ordinary farmers and 

 fruit-growers cannot do for theinselves. There are lines of 

 inquiry which require a consistent scheme extending over 



a series of years, and such work the farmer has no time or 

 ability to carry on. IMuch research of this kind requires 

 apparatus which ordinary tillers of the soil canriot afford to 

 buy and which they could not use to any purpose if they 

 owned them, and much of it demands a knowledge of sci- 

 entific methods which the average farmer and gardener do 

 not pretend to possess. A great deal of the station work 

 which would be stigmatized by cavilers as theoretical or 

 technical, as if purely scientific investigations excluded 

 what was useful, is in reality work of the most serious prac- 

 tical value. The directors and officers of the stations 

 know this as well as any one else, and when they spend 

 their time in testing a hundred and fifty varieties of Straw- 

 berries in order to ascertain which one is a day the earliest 

 in a given place, or yields the biggest and reddest berries, 

 they may delude a few people with the idea that they are 

 doing eminently practical work, but they must know that 

 work of genuine practical value comprehends the investi- 

 gation of some fundamental scientific principle. 



Upon the whole, however, when it is considered that the 

 stations are new, and that at the passage of the Hatch bill, 

 half a dozen years ago, there was hardly a score of men in 

 the country who had sufficient experience to carry on with 

 any efficiency the work of the stations, when we remember, 

 too, the constant pressure upon them for some immediate 

 and tangible results, the wonder is that so little effort has 

 been wasted. There are now fifty-four of these stations, 

 and the total number of persons engaged in them is about 

 five hundred, and the sum they received last year from the 

 state and national governments was more than a million 

 dollars. The inquiry is pertinent, therefore, whether the 

 economic results of these stations justify such an outlay. 

 This is an inquiry to which Professor Frear replies in a 

 recent number of Agricultural Science. While it is impos- 

 sible to say just how many dollars and cents have been 

 added to the wealth of the country by the direct researches 

 of the stations, Professor Frear shows that in the utiliza- 

 tion of by-products in our crops of cotton and grain, in the 

 saving of what was once wasted in feeding unbalanced 

 rations to domestic animals, in collecting more com- 

 pletely the butter fats in milk, in checking the damage 

 from insect ravages and fungous diseases which, together, 

 have amounted to more than $500,000,000 a year, in all 

 these and other direct ways the amount of money already 

 saved by the aid of investigations undertaken by the experi- 

 ment stations, has greatly exceeded all they have cost. 

 And this estimate entirely ignores a most important branch 

 of station work, the trade-control, which, to a certain ex- 

 tent, gives the farmer a guarantee that the fertilizers which 

 he buys are honest, the seed clean, and the food of his 

 cattle unadulterated, while at the same time it assures the 

 consumer that the milk, the butter and other farm-prod- 

 ucts which he buys are of standard value. 



But, in addition to all this, the education of the farmer, 

 the fruit-grower and the horticulturist by correspondence 

 with the stations and by their publications has been of 

 great value, and has prepared them for much more 

 efficient work. In- addition to letters and bulletins from 

 the station, the farmers in many states have the benefit of 

 institutes, conducted largely by station officers, and this 

 brings the two classes into familiar personal contact, which 

 stimulates inquiry on the one hand and accustoms those 

 who feel they need assistance to make application for it at 

 the proper source. Perhaps the inspiration which this con- 

 tact with the stations has given to farmers and gardeners, 

 the spirit of inquiry which it stimulates among them, the 

 expansion of their mental horizon and the habit it en- 

 courages of looking for broad principles upon which to base 

 their practice, are, after all, the most important benefits 

 which the stations have yet conferred upon the country. 

 When it once becomes a doctrine universally accepted 

 as true, that science is the only sure foundation for the 

 successful practice of agriculture and horticulture, an inesti- 

 mable advantage will have been gained. When it has 

 become a part of farm practice and farm life to trust ta 



