HISTORY OF THE SECOND YEAR’S WORK. 19 
spring rains had begun to fall and the grass was making growth. The 
gains as reported by the committee were phenomenal, considering the 
fact of the drought of 1898, being 100 per cent in a single year, and, 
had the station pastures been stocked during the year to their capacity, 
as recommended by the committee in March, 1898, it would have been 
fair to take the result as demonstrating the correctness of the theories 
underlying the methods adopted to improve the range. But on 
account of the droughts the pastures were not stocked nearly as heay- 
ily as had been recommended during a considerable part of the year, 
and it was still an open question whether the improved condition of 
the station pastures, especially those which were harrowed and disked, 
was not quite as much due to the fact that they had been rested at the 
season when the grass seeds were maturing and dropping-as to the 
fact that the surface had been treated. 
CONCLUSIONS FROM THE FIRST YEAR’S WORK. 
At the end of the first year’s station work the facts as above set out 
were reported to the Agrostologist, and the conclusions as submitted 
were: 
(1) Tnat it will pay farmers and stockmen of Texas, especially in 
the semiarid regions of the State, to cultivate their pastures by use 
of disk and iron-tooth harrows. 
(2) That it will pay them to rest their pastures periodically during 
the seasons when the grass seeds are maturing and falling to the 
ground. 
It was believed then that the results of the station work to that time, 
under the conditions set out, clearly demonstrated the correctness of 
these conclusions, and later results have confirmed them. 
HISTORY OF THE SECOND YEAR’S WORK. 
EXPERIMENTS WITH VARIETIES. 
The conditions under which the work was continued into the second 
year were very difficult. In the first place the continuous extreme 
cold during the months of January and February was very unfavor- 
able for experimental work. During January the thermometer fre- 
quently indicated several degrees below freezing point, and during 
February there were but eight days when the temperature was above 
32°. The month of January was dry, even for that section, the total 
precipitation being only 0.51 inch. During February it was but 0.01 
inch—practically nothing—and only 0.04 inch during March. During 
the autumn of 1898 the 10-acre garden tract had been plowed deep 
with a turning plow, the purpose being to expose the earth to the 
freezes to follow and to save every drop of rain that might fall there. 
