32 



SOME LITERATURE. 



keep them sturdy, and graduall}- inure them to the 

 weather so as to have them ready for planting out in 

 May, as soon as danger from frost is gone. 



They should be planted out in beds in an open loca- 

 tion for preference, where they can be shaded for an 

 hour or two during the hottest part of the day, and be 

 regularly supplied with water. Should the weather be 

 hot and dry, a good mulching of manure from an old 

 mushroom bed helps to keep them moist and prevents 

 the soil, through frequent waterings, from becoming 

 hard. About the middle of July they will begin to bloom 



and keep continuously on till frost cuts them down. 

 They should then be cut off to within two inches of the 

 ground and put in an open dry place. When the stems 

 fall away from the bulbs, which is about ten days after- 

 wards, they should be stored away until spring. By 

 marking them when in flower, the best can be selected 

 for growing in pots for conservatory decoration, and the 

 inferior ones kept for bedding, which purpose they an- 

 swer admirably, making larger plants and blooming 

 earlier than seedlings. 



T. Griffen. 



SOME LITERATURE. 



VALUABLE INFORMATION FROM THE GOVERNMENT. 



"Of making many books there is no end," and 

 of the fashioning of bulletins there is no limit, and 

 no precedent. There are kinds to suit all tastes, and 

 and no tastes. The most entertaining are the bul- 

 letins of promise. Like promissory notes, they are 

 easy to make. One would think that the millenium 

 of agriculture were sure to come within a twelve- 

 month. Cattle feeding, forage plants, chemistry of 

 everything in the soil and above it, science of the 

 winds and rain, diseases of plants, diseases of ani- 

 mals, kinds of vegetables and fruits, methods of cul- 

 Itivating everything, science of insects and birds, 

 and a score of other definite and simple problems 

 are to receive attention. This is one way of saying, 

 "we are ready for anything." Promissory bulletins, 

 like the first chapters of books, are easy to write. 

 Somehow one warms up to his subject at an amazing 

 rate when he grasps his pen and stabs it into a new 

 field. Promises roll off in ink drops, and it is hard 

 to close the chapter. 



Akin to these bulletins are the explanatory ones. 

 They assume the reader to be a child and then pro- 

 ceed to explain with the most painstaking minute- 

 ness. It is all made so clear that one wonders why 

 he needs to know it — and perhaps he does not need 

 to know it. 



Then comes the bulletin with a report of progress 

 — a list of trees and shrubs and vegetables which 

 will drive a catalogue maker to shame. A useful 

 bulletin this, for it informs people what the station 

 owns, and that is information which we all want. 

 Now and then we get the big bulletin, groaning 

 under a load of a couple hundred pages. Capital 

 volume this for the top shelf of a closet cupboard, 

 where, like the Raven, it sits "everxnore." 



The statistical bulletin is common. It stares at 

 you with great rows and columns of figures, and you 

 sink back into your chair completely squelched. 

 Figures never lie — so they say — and you are ap- 



palled at the amount of truth which these bulletins 

 must contain. But in four cases out of five you can- 

 not find the truth, for the phenomenal author has 

 not had the time to give you any conclusions or 

 summaries. There are no short cuts. And the 

 best you can do is to carefully light your pipe with 

 the leaves, one by one, and hope to inhale some of 

 the ponderous facts. Nothing so impressess one with 

 the inexhaustible resources of the human mind, as 

 this ability, which some people possess, to go delib- 

 erately into the field and count the number of peas 

 in a thousand pods, to compute how many flowers 

 there must be in a row of pumpkins, to weigh a hun- 

 dred turnips, and then to go home and put down the 

 figures ! What do the figures teach ? Why that, 

 sir, is no part of the matter. It is enough to have 

 the figures. 



There are tardy bulletins. Along in November 

 comes a bulletin, dated last January or May. It is 

 necessarily apologetic. It covers the emptiness of 

 the intervening months. This is the quintessence of 

 convenience, this dating back of bulletins. It meets 

 the requirements of the law — in a measure — and en- 

 ables the winter to take a long and deliberate retro- 

 spect of months of idleness. Or, perchance, the 

 writer is free to admit that he has no experiment to 

 report, but he falls back upon that convenient and 

 well-saddled see-saw, "a great many applications 

 have been made for this information," " this bulle- 

 tin is written in answer to questions from numerous 

 applicants," etc., etc. But we should not hold the 

 bulletin writer to too strict an account in this con- 

 nection, for perhaps half our rural books are writ- 

 ten — or are said to be — in response to just such de- 

 mands upon the noted author's time and inexhaus- 

 tible knowledge. 



Then there is the grandiose bulletin, which Mi- 

 cawber would have delighted to read. " And now 

 in coiaclusion, " runs a Louisiana cotton bulletin. 



