Let us take Plant Breeding out of the class of hopelessly 
unprofitable professions and put it where it belongs among 
those which render to society the most lasting and productive 
benefits : one upon which the future beauty of our flower gardens 
and the wealth of our orchards and fields depends. 
EVENING RAIN IN SPRING. 
By Margaret Peckham. 
Ear lulls are faintly filmed with rain, 
Dim, draining skies, translucent grey, 
Show thru the shining black of trees that dripping sway, 
Lifting their budding tips to drink and drink again. 
The sopping grass is soaked a vivid green. 
The trickling drops run down the waterspout 
To splash along the house edge, washing pebbles clean 
And thudding on the gutter running out, 
Fresh, sweet, damp-earth smells coolly rise, 
While gusts of scented cherry petals hurry by, 
The robins wetly whistle twilight lullabies 
And rain and night are fast dissolving in the sky. 
Book Reviews 
*The Amateur's Book of the Dahlia. Stout, Mrs. Charles H. 
Illustrated. 1922. Doubleday, Page & Company. $3.00. 
Those who are talking of "the crest of the Dahlia wave" 
evidently have their eyes set on the future and not on the present 
or the past. The Dahlia has been coming into its own for many 
years and probably at no time has the coming been any more 
rapid and manifest than it is just now. Mrs. Stout's new book 
comes out at the right time to help make 1922 a year of notable 
progress in the history of Dahlia culture. As Mrs. Francis 
King has said in her discriminating introduction, "this 
book should prove a torch to light the way." 
The first three chapters of the book, dealing with the early 
history of the Dahlia, its native Mexican home, and important 
steps in the development of the flower in Europe, carry the 
reader from the Mexican acocotli of Hernandez to the modern 
miracle, with 
' ' So many forms we cannot classify them, 
So many colors we cannot describe them, 
So many varieties we cannot name them, 
So many admirers Ave cannot count them ! ' ' 
In the course of a valuable chapter on ' ' Soil-Composition and 
Preparation," the author, as a result of a definite experimental 
comparison of sand and sifted coal ashes as media for lightening 
heavy soils, pronounces against coal ashes, which many growers 
of Dahlias have used with improved results. However, there is 
no doubt that sand is the better for this purpose, even though 
not always so easily obtainable. Succeeding chapters treat fully 
of propagation, breeding, cultivation, planting, staking, fertiliz- 
300 
