ig ° 7 ] Garden, Field, and Forest of the Nation. 63 
tions to predict a time, and that not very far distant, when 
there will not be bread enough to go around. 
While enough has been done in the restoration of worn out soils 
to show that the time is farther away than was at first feared, 
much more has been done in the breeding of new varieties 
of wheat and corn to take the place of the old and unsatisfac- 
tory ones. New wheats have been created not only showing 
larger yields and as great nutrition in experimental plots, but 
in the thousand-acre farm of the advanced American Agri- 
culturist as well. More than this, wheats have been bred to 
fit a climate, redeeming vast areas of abandoned land sup- 
posed to be wholly unfit for wheat production. 
New corns have been created, far richer in food values, far 
larger in yield, than the best known types of the past. More 
than this, corns have been created at the command of man 
for any one of a series of specific purposes — to be rich in one 
element and lean in another, to be food for man or food for 
beast. They are, in a word, as much the creation of man as 
the beautiful vase in the hands of the potter. 
The experiment station of the University of Tennessee 
determined to breed a wheat that should fit the soil and cli- 
mate of that State, where no wheat would grow and produce 
good results. When the experiments were begun, eight 
bushels to the acre was a fair average yield. After several 
years of testing, breeding, and selection, they have produced 
a wheat that has produced as high as forty-eight and one-half 
bushels per acre on the same land, while maintaining an 
average of over thirty-seven bushels for a period of four or 
five years. And we in North Carolina have reaped the bene- 
fits of this and similar experiments elsewhere in the extension 
of wheat producing area to the poorer lands of the eastern 
part of the State. 
When we consider corn, the greatest cereal in point of value 
of annual production in the United States, the results achieved 
are even more satisfactory. The object sought in breeding 
new corns was not only to produce corn with a heavier yield, 
