ILLINOIS STATE DAIRYMEN'S ASSOCIATION. 259 



means. The average yield of corn per acre for the five years, 1895-99 

 inclusive, was 3.2 bushels more than the five years just preceding that 

 period. This is an increase of 14 per cent. This means an annual in- 

 crease of two hundred and fifty million bushels of corn from the same 

 acreage. If used in place of wheat more than half enough to bread the 

 nation. All the golden metal mined in the same period in the United 

 States would not begin to buy today merely the increase in this golden 

 grain — the gift of prodigal nature. 



It would be indeed pleasing in this connection to relate that this in- 

 crease in yield has resulted from the investigations of our experiment 

 stations and the teachings of our agricultural colleges. To make such 

 a statement would be to make the wish father of the thought. Doubt- 

 less such agencies may mave modified slightly and when the teachings of 

 the stations are put into general practice, will largely affect the result, 

 but as surely as the rains fall and the frosts come we may expect a series 

 of unpropitious seasons. Some fine morning we will wake up to find the 

 scare heads of our "No breakfast is complete without it," newspaper, 

 have been changed and that accounts of wars and industrial combina- 

 tions have been relegated to the second page. 



It is well known to scientists that the existence of all animal life 

 and hence of the human race upon the globe is dependent upon the fixa- 

 tion of carbon through the influence of the sun's rays. It is also well 

 understood that the nation's material prosperity is due to those me- 

 chanical inventions that have made available to recent generations the 

 stored up fertility of the soil and the stored up carbon in coal, oil, and 

 gas. How the conquest of Asia, Africa, and South x\merica may affect 

 the world at large, no one can with certainty predict, but it seems rea- 

 sonably certain that so far as the United States is concerned trapping 

 carbon or bottling sunshine is to be a much greater problem than it has 

 been in the past. 



Does this mean that famine stares us in the face? Does the fate of 

 Egypt, Greece, and Rome await us? Such an inference is by no means 

 necessary. I am no pessimist. The human race has solved its probems 



