240 
APRIL 8 
T II K 
RURAL NLW'YORKER, 
A National Journal for Country and Suburban Homes. 
Conducted by 
KliBKRT B CAI1HAK, 
Address 
THE RURAL NEW-YORKER, 
No. 34 1' me Row, Nbw York. 
SATURDAY, APRIL S, 1882. 
Our supply of the Rural Thoroughbred 
Flint Corn is now exhausted, and all sub¬ 
sequent orders therefor will be filled with 
the Rural Heavy Dent. 
- -- 
If the number on your wrapper after 
the name is 1080, your subscription ex¬ 
pires with this week’s paper; if the 
number is 1681, next week, and so on. 
Seepage 244 for full explanation. 
Our next article from Dr. J. B. Lawes 
will raise the question as to the differ¬ 
ence in the estimated value and conse¬ 
quent price between clover in England 
and the United States. 
-♦♦♦- 
Personal correspondence may for the 
the present season be directed to the Edi¬ 
tor at River Edge, Bergen Co., New Jer¬ 
sey, as such correspondence will then 
receive more prompt attention than if di¬ 
rected to the office. 
The attention of our readers is again 
called to the fact that we arc desirous of 
rectifying any mistakes that may have 
occured in our regular Seed Distribution 
of 1881-2, and of sending the seeds to all 
who are entitled to them. A notification 
by postal card is all that is required. 
To Several Friends.— A considera¬ 
ble number of our friends—chiefly new 
subscribers—ask us to send them speci¬ 
mens of the White Elephant Potato, or 
of some of the other articles embraced in 
our Free Seed Distributions of 1881, 
while some request us to send them speci¬ 
mens of seeds or plants contained in the 
Distributions of two, three or more years 
ago. We cannot possibly oblige our 
friends in this way. 
--- ♦-» - » - 
The Umbrella Pine.— We are pleased 
to be able to state that this odd evergreen 
tree, the Umbrella Pine (Sciadopitys 
verticil lata) so extensively used in the 
gardens and about the temples of the Ja¬ 
panese, has thus far proved entirely hardy 
at the Rural Grounds. It is surprising 
that so little is said about it, for, being 
not only a novelty, but one of the oddest 
sorts, it should excite a good deal of 
comment. It is as different from any of 
the conifers generally grown in this coun¬ 
try as is the hemlock from the pine. 1 he 
leaves are from two to three inches long, 
two lines wide in wliorls of from 25 to 40 
at the ioints and extremities of the branch¬ 
es It is said by some to attain a bight 
of from 80 to 125 feet--by others only 
that of from 10 to 15 feet. Judging by 
the very slow growth of our own speci¬ 
men, the latter estimate is nearer the 
truth. 
-- <+ ♦-» -- - 
Anotiier Great Patent War is about 
to break out in the West—one relating to 
automatic twine-binding harvesters. It is 
claimed that the patents granted in 1880 
to Marquis L. Gorham, of Rockford, Illi¬ 
nois, and now owned chiefly, if not exclu¬ 
sively, by O. A. McCormick, of Chicago, 
Illinois, coverall devices for automatically 
binding the bundles of grain. Accord¬ 
ingly those who control the Gorham pat¬ 
ents are about to proceed against all who 
make twine binders under the Appleby pat¬ 
ents, and they have already begun opera¬ 
tions by demanding a royalty of $10 for 
every machiuc male or to be made by the 
Minneapolis Harvester Works, of Minne¬ 
apolis, Minnesota. They have also en¬ 
gaged first-class patent, lawyers in New 
York, Philadelphia, Cleveland and Cin¬ 
cinnati, and declared war upon all twine- 
binders outside those made under the 
Gorham patents. Our sympathy, good 
wishes and best efforts are in favor of the 
opponents of this projected patent op¬ 
pression. Even if the owners of the 
Gorham patents refrain from the outrage 
of collecting royalty from the innocent 
u sera of twine binders made under other 
patents, yet the exaction of a royalty 
of $10 on each machine made by other 
manufacturers would take at least that 
amount out of the pockets of each user 
of such a machine ; for, of course, the 
manufacturer would add the royalty to 
the cost of the harvester. We have fre¬ 
quently urged the necessity of a com¬ 
plete revision of our patent laws ; and the 
controllers of the Gorham patents seem 
determined to add another forcible rea¬ 
son to the many already existing in favor 
of such a measure. 
-- 
NO "PROTECTION” FOR AGRICUL¬ 
TURE 
A great deal of dearly-paid-for time 
has lately been taken up by Congress in 
discussing the subject of a revision of the 
tariff. In order to defer action the out- 
and-out protectionists introduced a bill 
for the appointment of a Commission to 
investigate the entire subject and give to 
Congress such advice as to alterations in 
the present tariff as their researches might, 
suggest. The advocates of free trade as 
well as those of a modification of our pre¬ 
sent import duties protest against the delay 
inevitable from the appointment of such a 
Commission, and are urgent that the Com¬ 
mittee of Ways and Means should ht the 
earliest opportunity either greatly lessen 
or altogether remove the import duties 
upon certain commodities. Probably the 
strongest and most influential advocate of 
this plan h. Mr. Abraham Hewitt, of New 
York, one of the most extensive manu¬ 
facturers m the country Last Thursday 
he made what is termed a “powerful” 
speech in support of his views, which, we 
arc told, made a strong impression on the 
House. He prefaced it by a resolution 
that instructions be given to the Com¬ 
mittee of Ways and Means to report with¬ 
in JO days, or earlier if practicable, a bill 
based upon certain specified instructions 
of which the following are emphatically 
in jurious to the interests of agriculture. 
(Resolved). First—That all raw materials, 
meaning thereby all materials which have not 
been subjected to any process of manufac¬ 
ture, and all waste products, mean mg thereby 
all waste materials which are fit only to he 
manufactured, * * * shall lie put on the 
free list. 
Should legislation based on these in¬ 
structions take place, then the present 
duties of about 70 per cent on wool as 
well as those on a considerable number of 
other agricultural products, will be re¬ 
moved, to the great injury or entire de¬ 
struction of the industries that produce 
them. The farmers of the country can 
afford to tolerate the removal of these 
duties only on condition of the adoption of 
free trade in the widest sense of the term. 
RAILROADS AND THE PEOPLE. 
That the railroads of the country have 
conferred great benefits upon the public 
cannot be gainsaid any more than that, 
under a just and honest management, the 
benefits would have been vastly greater. 
Last Wednesday the Secretary of the In¬ 
terior furnished Congress some very sug¬ 
gestive figures in answer to a House reso¬ 
lution asking for a list, of Stales and cor¬ 
porations that have received land grants 
and have not fulfilled the conditions on 
which those grants were made. The 
total area of land grants to both classes 
is 127,881,357 acres. Of this vast area 
eight, railroad companies have received 
110,580,008 acres, though only 8,071,891 
acres have been “ patented ” to them. 
They agreed to build 7,748 miles of rail¬ 
road, and have built only 1,401 miles. 
Grants of 21,292,248 acres have been 
made to 10 States for railroad building 
purposes, and only about half this area 
has been “ patented ” to the railroad cor¬ 
porations in the States. How liberal the 
promises of railroad corporations! how 
niggardly their performance ! For a 
series of years the net earnings of the five 
Pacific, roads have been briefly :— 
Net earnings. 
Central l'aclfie from December, 1809, to 
December is8i.$64,557,717 15 
Union 1’aeinc from November, 1869, to 
December, I8SI. 79,685.551 19 
Central hraneb Union Pacific trom Oc¬ 
tober, 1868, to December, 1881. 1,451,191 90 
Kanr.au Pacific from November, 1868, to _ 
December, 1879. 11,031,276 01 
Sioux City and Pacific, from September, 
1868. to December, 1881. 1,181,992 61 
Total.. 8157,917,682 52 
The government subsidies in land and 
money furnished a fund more than sufli- 
cicnt to build these roads, and the U. 8. 
Treasury is still paying the interest on its 
own bonds issued to construct them, and 
must do so until the bonds mature. But 
although the capital for constructing the 
roads came out of the public Treasury 
and although their net earnings are so 
enormous, yet their greed is insatiable. 
In no case have they fulfilled their part 
of the compact, yet they hold the govern¬ 
ment rigidly to its implied obligations, 
and while their exactions from the public 
are limited only by the means and pa¬ 
tience of the people, they are using every 
legal device, backed up olten by legisla¬ 
tive corruption, to wrest unfair gains from 
the States they traverse as well as from 
the National Government. 
PRICES OF POTATOES. 
An average of 75,000 bushels of Euro¬ 
pean potatoes, chiefly from Scotland, have 
lately been landed at the port of New 
York every month. They pay an Import 
duty of 15c. per bushel as well as freight 
across the Atlantic and sell, wholesale, at 
00c. to 75c. per bushel, or from $2 to 
$2.25 per barrel. As E. Rose sell for 
$2.50 to $2; Snowflake, for $3.11 to 
$3.37; and Burbank from $3.12 to $3.30, 
it is evident that public taste prefers the 
native sorts to the foreign. It would seem, 
too, that the profit must be very small, un¬ 
less there is a large superabundance of po¬ 
tatoes this year in Great Britain, yet a 
Scotch vegetable bouse lias just opened a 
branch here with the expectation that the 
traffic will be permanent. A year ago, 
however, our Market Reports show that 
Early Rose sold here for $2 to $2.25 per 
barrel; Mercer for $1.75 to $1.85; Snow¬ 
flake from $1.75 to $2.25 and Burbank from 
$3 to $2 25. In St. Louis, Early Rose sold 
for 87 l-2c. to 00c. per bushel; Burbank 
for 90c. to 02 1-2o. and Pcucllblow for 
75c. to 85c. Now they sell there, respec¬ 
tively, for $1.20, $1 38 and $1.25, and 
nearly the same difference in price exists 
in all the chief markets throughout, the 
country. At this season in 1880 E. Rose 
sold here per barrel at $1.25 to $1.50 and 
other varieties proportionately low and 
all over the country the prices were 
equally unremunerativo. The truth of 
the matter is that in 1870 and 1880 the 
potato crop was very abundant nearly 
everywhere and consequently prices were 
hardly remuueiative enough, consequently 
in 1881 a smaller area was planted to this 
crop, and the dmight greatly curtailed 
the yield even from the acreage planted, 
so that the potato crop of 1881—which 
we arc now eating has been high-priced, 
and therefore very remunerative to those 
who had fair crops. But just as the low 
prices of 1870-80 and of 1880-81 induced 
an unwise decrease of the potato area in 
the following season, so it is very likely 
that the high prices of 1881 2, will lead 
to the planting of so large an acreage 
this year that juices during next Winter 
will be so low as to render imported pota¬ 
toes unprofitable. It would be well for 
our friends to bear this probability in 
mind when deciding ujion the acreage for 
this crop. 
ADULTERATION OF COTTON. 
The very best line red sand in the Cot¬ 
ton Belt cannot be there worth over $5 
per ton, yet some very poor red sand 
from that section is being sold in England 
to very unwilling buyers at $280 per ton, 
though the transportation charges be¬ 
tween the two jilac.es arc not. more than $(!() 
a ton. It is not. through the stupidity or 
whim of British purchasers that this high 
price is paid, but owing to the intentional 
fraud of mean, unprincipled, contempt¬ 
ibly dishonest and abjectly selfish plant¬ 
ers on this side of the Atlantic. The re¬ 
cent investigations of Mr. Albert D. >Shaw, 
United States Consul at Manchester, Eng 
laud, leave no shadow of doubt that 
American cotton is to a considerable ex¬ 
tent adulterated with sand and other 
foreign substances. At Oldham, Lon 
cash ire, 100 pounds of sand were found in 
a single bale, and a 5 1-2 pound stone and 
a toy pistol in another. At, Stockport a 
spinner found a lot of 100 bales charged 
with red sand to an extent varying fiom 
9 to 20 per cent of its weight. At War¬ 
rington a series of tests of Texas and New 
Orleans cotton found 17 1-2 per cent was 
sand. Other foreign substances found in 
bales arc a lot of cartridges, 40 pounds of 
white sand, lumps of wood, bricks and 
jiicccs of iron. To add fraudulently to 
the weight others saturated the interior 
of the bales with water so that uot infre¬ 
quently masses of caked cotton were found 
in the bales, and a drying heat has re¬ 
duced the weight 10 to 15 jicr cent. 
There are also other less palpable forms 
of adulteration, for a Preston sjiinr.er de¬ 
clares that while with Egypt!tin, Brazilian 
and Surat cotton his firm could account 
for every pound bought, there is always 
a loss of-from three to live per cent of 
American cotton in the jirocess of spin¬ 
ning, appearing neither as yarn nor waste, 
and evidently due to imperceptible im¬ 
purities. 
There is no doubt that the vast bulk of 
American cotton is honestly baled and 
put on tlie market, but the great body of 
jdunters suffer from the rascality of a few 
growers and packers. There isn’t a bale 
of American cotton the value of which iB 
not lowered in the English market by the 
dishonesty of these swindlers. In addition 
to the loss incurred through adulteration 
with sand, the stuff injures the machinery, 
and the cotton with which it is mixed will 
not work properly. Small wonder there¬ 
fore that some spinners already make a 
deduction for jiossible adulterations in 
buying American cotton, and that tho 
practice is spreading, and would do so 
more rajmlly were it not that the Liver¬ 
pool brokers, through whom the cotton is 
sold, readily make allowance for “ sand ” 
or “ caked ” cotton; but, of course, these 
pay a lower price for all American cotton 
to insure themselves against such losses. 
As they cannot tell what particular lots 
arc adulterated they treat, every lot as 
fraudulent, not a little to the growers’ loss 
and their own profit. 
How can an end be put to such low, 
shabby, unneighborly practices? Until 
about a dozen years ago the packers of 
Indian cotton used sand and water even 
more freely than our own swindlers. The 
Cotton Frauds Act of 1803 made it penal 
either to adulterate cotton or to sell it 
when adulterated, but though the law was 
amended in 187 8 7 it has nearly always 
been a dead letter, as it is now. The re¬ 
formation legislation failed to secure the 
cotton buyers have accomplished by 
means of skilled inspectors, who make 
every man understand that it is to his in¬ 
terest to send only pure cotton to market. 
Why not, according to Consul Shaw’s 
suggestion, jilace in the heart of each bale 
a large card with the name of the pro¬ 
ducer, the number of pounds in the bale, 
etc, and let a duplicate record be sent 
with the cotton when sold? With little 
trouble or expense every bale sold to the 
New-England or Lancashire spinner could 
he so marked as to be easily traced from 
the field to the loom -a sure protection 
agaiust such pernicious adulteration. 
-♦-*--♦- 
BREVITIES. 
We hope our subscribers will bike Rood care 
of the Golden lleartwell Celery of our present 
Free Seed Distribution. 
Tiik Youths’ Department is crowded put 
this week. Tho regular Discussion of the Hor¬ 
ticultural Club will bo published in our next 
issue. 
Tumariiole entitled “ Hop Culture” on page 
214 of our last issue was written by E, 8. 
Braiuard, of Oneida Co , N. Y. Owing to an 
oversight the writer’s name, we are sorry to 
say, was omitted. 
The mere synopsis of the course of 40 lec¬ 
tures on practical fruit culture delivered at 
the Ohio State University during the Fall 
term of 1881, l>y Professor W. R, Lazenby, is 
itself interesting ns showing the immensity of 
the Held, t he variety of objects of culture, and 
the great need of early and thorough training 
as a means of securing future success in this 
art—so pleasant, and profitable to the well- 
prepared but so full or pit falls to the unin¬ 
structed or inexperienced. 
It is said that tigs can be grown in Arkan¬ 
sas more cheaply than elsewhere, and that a 
number of planters are setting out orchards. 
A cutting is planted either in the Fall or in 
the Spring, and in two years it begins to bear. 
There are many sorts, sizes and colors ; some 
are quite small—some are as large as a hen’s 
egg. The first ripen in June and they con¬ 
tinue ripening till frost. They can be dried or 
preserved like other fruits. Air. Wilson of 
Drew County is named us having now a fine 
and profitable orchard. Ho says that the 
f growing of this fruit will be one of the most 
ucrativo industries in the State. The trees 
thrive on almost any soil and demand very 
little laborious cultivation. 
One of the editors was reproaching the man 
nger of the composition room last week that 
several valuable articles were left out of the 
paper. “ Well,” said he earnestly, “I cau’t 
get more into the paper than it will hold.” In 
like manner, some or our readers are mildly 
reminding us that our poor story is neglected; 
that the department "For Women” is nog 
looted, and so on Wo are as helpless as our 
superintendent. We can uot got. more into the 
paper than it will hold. Our supplements 
seem scarcely a drop in the bucket of relief. 
We know not how long this unprecedented 
pressure of correspondence and advertisements 
will last. We huve only to express the hope 
that our good readers will find in this pressure 
u compensation in many ways for what they 
lose temporarily in a few matters of seemingly 
less importance. We shall endeavor to do Jus¬ 
tice all around in due time. Itisnot proposed 
that tho prosper ity of the paper shall oll’er us 
an excuse for long neglecting any part of it. 
In all the principal produce markets there 
is a good deal of itgltation just now with re¬ 
gard to the most efficient means of checking 
“ corners ” in grain and other furm products, 
and various suggestions huve been mude look¬ 
ing either to tho punishment of the manipu¬ 
lators of “coiners” or to fixing the upshot 
price of the “ cornered ” product so as to pre¬ 
vent the “cornering” speculators, or, in other 
words, ihn “longs” from “squeezing” the 
“shorts" into heavy financial loss or bank¬ 
ruptcy. It seems to us that any measure of 
this sort is unfair and will be ineffective. 
Unless the “ shorts "—those who alone suffer 
from “corners”—sold what they didn’t have 
with a view to depress prices, there could bo 
no such thing as a “corner." They are in 
reality the worst, gamblers in these transac¬ 
tions: then why all this fuss about menus for 
their protection. Let the Boards of Trade 
abolish all rules against. “ corners" in produce 
and require a rigid fulfillment of all con¬ 
tracts, and speculators, after a few tight 
squeezes, will be either crushed to financial 
death or have learned that the only trade that 
pays is to sell what one actually possesses. 
The relation of supply and demand will then 
will then have a chance to regulate prices. 
