I 
496 
THE RURAL NEW-YORKER. 
J uly 8 
Short Stories. 
Corn Stalk “Combine.” —It is said 
that 250.000,000 tons of corn stalks are 
wasted every year in this country, for 
lack of available means of disposing of 
them. A corn stalk “combine,” with a 
capital of $50,000,0w, is being organized 
to utilize these stalks. The pith is used 
for packing in warships, and the hard 
part of the stalk is ground up for cattle 
feeding. The stalks also make card- 
hoard, paper, glue, and the foundation 
for dynamite. Ground corn stalks and 
the waste molasses from the sugar fac¬ 
tories are cooked and pressed into 
bricks, and sold for stock food. The 
combine expects to make a vast fortune 
by utilizing the corn stalks that are at 
present wasted. It is not likely to in¬ 
crease the commercial value of stalks in 
districts where they are now used. It is 
more likely to decrease their value. 
Swallowing Toads.—The R. N.-Y. 
has set out to run down a few of the 
“fake” stories that appear at regular in¬ 
tervals in the daily papers. Here is an 
old friend that comes up every year: 
Canton, Pa., June 13.— Mrs. Mary Wether- 
ell, of Alba, near here, was taken violently 
ill yesterday, and during a vomiting spell, 
a half-grown toad was emitted. Mrs. 
Wetherell had been ill for a year. She says 
that, three, years ago, while drinking in the 
dark from a spring, she swallowed some 
soft object, and now thinks that it must 
have been the toad. 
Prof. Slingerland says that it would 
be quite possible for one to swallow a 
small toad in drinking water, but it 
would be entirely impossible for said 
toad to exist or remain either dead or 
alive in a person’s alimentary canal for 
any such length of time as mentioned in 
the clipping. 
Proper Food. —In discussing the value 
of digestion experiments, Prof. Otis, of 
the Kansas Agricultural College, makes 
this statement: 
The animal body requires certain chemical 
elements to enable it to replace worn-out 
tissues, and perform Its various functions. 
These elements must be presented to it in 
an available form, however. Soft coal, 
with its ordinary impurities, and water, 
probably, contain all of the elements neces¬ 
sary to the growth of the animal body, and 
for the production of force; but while these 
answer admirably for a steam engine, the 
coal would be of little use to an animal. 
That is a good illustration of one 
great principle in feeding plants or ani¬ 
mals. Burn the coal under the engine 
boiler, and you will produce power. 
Grind the coal and feed it to a man, a 
horse or a potato plant, and death would 
result, though analysis might show 
that the coal contained all the food ele¬ 
ments that were needed to sustain life. 
They were neither soluble nor well 
balanced. We cannot hope to nourish 
the man, animal, or plant until we give 
it available food. 
A Smart Boy.—I am going to take the 
-this year, and did not intend to 
take The R. N.-Y. While I did not ex¬ 
pect the omer paper to fill the place of 
The R. N.-Y., I did think it might 
answer, and I can hardly afford two ag¬ 
ricultural papers. But this afternoon, 
when I got camped down on the lounge 
ready for an hour’s undisturbed read, I 
changed my mind. I felt as though 
something was wrong about the house, 
all wrong, or that perhaps the clock had 
stopped. I shouldn’t have heeded my 
own feelings, though, if my little boy, 
not quite two years old, had not said 
as plainly as he could, that he, too, felt 
something was wrong. The first I no¬ 
ticed him, he stood reaching his little 
arm up to the pile of papers in the 
paper-rack, saying repeatedly Yok or 
York, or something between the two. I 
got up and gave him a Boston Globe; 
without looking at it, he threw it on 
the floor. I gave him the Lewiston 
Journal; he threw that on the floor like¬ 
wise. I then gave him an old R. N.-Y.; 
when I took it from the rack, his little 
face lit up, he put his hands clasped be¬ 
tween his legs, and when it got near 
enough to him, he took the paper with a 
snatch. He looked at it a minute or 
more, turning it over so he could see the 
pictures, down it went on the floor; he 
had seen those pictures before, and no 
paper up there would satisfy him, al¬ 
though, whenever I got hold of a R. N.- 
Y., he was pleased until he was satisfied 
he had seen it before. I have always 
felt very choice of my papers, and tried 
to keep them whole, but the little scamp 
has repeatedly torn off a leaf for me, 
but I never realized before that he took 
a preference to them over the other pa¬ 
pers I have around. So just send the 
paper to him, and I hope he will always 
be as judicious in his selections. 
Topsham, Me. w. t. o. 
A Strange Importation. —The recent 
rise in the Rio Grande, which is altering 
the boundary between the United States 
and Mexico, recalls a similar flood sev¬ 
eral years ago, which transferred part 
of a Mexican ranch, stocked with sev¬ 
eral thousand sheep, to the American 
side. The United States officials tried 
to make the ranchman pay import duty 
on the sheep, but he resisted payment 
successfully. Of course, his sheep re¬ 
mained on Mexican soil, although the 
nefarious action of the river had forci¬ 
bly annexed it to the United States. 
Making a Living. —In Boston recent¬ 
ly a young man and woman were to be 
married. Just before the wedding, a 20- 
year-old boy who was to serve as “best 
man,” induced the young woman to 
break her word, and marry him. They 
secured a license, ran off and were mar¬ 
ried. The boy’s father seems to be a 
sensible man. He is reported as say¬ 
ing: 
When I saw the bride’s family to-day, 
they said that my boy would have to sup¬ 
port his wife any way. I told them that 
he would have a nice time doing it, for he 
didn’t have much money of his own, and 
that when this is gone, he would have a 
nice job of it making a living for the two, 
for he couldn’t do anything but drive an 
ice wagon or a milk wagon, or else run an 
electric car, and he would have to have 
some practice to do that before he could 
draw any salary. 
That states the case about right for 
the average rich man's son. The pov¬ 
erty in a young man’s pedigree may be 
like a rocit foundation for a house! 
How Many Americans? —The authori¬ 
ties are already guessing at the results 
of the next census. Some great sur¬ 
prises are expected. The best guess is 
that there are now about 77,000,000 peo¬ 
ple in this country. Figuring back to 
1790, and taking the proportionate in¬ 
crease for each census, Dr. H. S. Pritch¬ 
ett makes the following estimate: 
1900 . 77,472,000 1970 257,688,000 
1910 . 94,673,000 1980 296,814,000 
1920 .114,416,000 1990 339,193,000 
1930 .136,887,000 2000 385,860,000 
1940 .162,268,000 21(H) 1,112,867,000 
1950 .190,740,000 2500 11,856,302,000 
I960 .222,067,000 2900 40,852,273,000 
Very few of us will be here in the 
year 2000 to see how peaceful and con¬ 
tented 400,000,000 Americans can live to¬ 
gether. In the year 2900, if this esti¬ 
mate is correct, there will be 11,000 per¬ 
sons to each square mile of Uncle Sam’s 
possessions. Colorado and the arid 
West will certainly have their oppor¬ 
tunity then. 
A Good Suggestion. —Texas Farm and 
Ranch makes this sensible suggestion: 
If the agricultural and horticultural in¬ 
terests of this country are to be represented 
at the Paris Exposition next year, we sug¬ 
gest the eminent propriety of sending Prof. 
T. V. Munson, of Denison, as a special rep¬ 
resentative of American viticulture. Prof. 
Munson’s work is known wherever grapes 
grow under the care of civilized men; he 
has added to our catalogue of valuable 
fruits more than 40 varieties of grapes of 
great value; not only is his great work 
known throughout this country, but France 
has given substantial evidence of her ap¬ 
preciation of the value of his service to the 
vine growers of that country, by awarding 
to him by a vote of the Chamber of Depu¬ 
ties, a gold medal and diploma. 
Why not? Prof. Munson has done 
much for American grape growing, and 
France fully recognizes the value of his 
services. It would be a graceful and 
profitable thing to send him to Paris. 
“Prosperity.” —Alva Agee, in the Na¬ 
tional Stockman, has this to say about 
the condition of farmers generally: 
Many people are now asserting that farm¬ 
ers are enjoying an era of great prosperity. 
These people comprise several classes, to 
wit: 1. The politicians that want the masses 
to rest satisfied. 2. The business men that 
have goods for sale. 3. The speculators who 
want prices to rise. 4. The Pharisees who 
believe that farmers form an inferior class, 
deserve only an inferior share of any in¬ 
crease in the country’s wealth, and have 
what they regard as prosperity when they 
secure that inferior share. 5. The cowards 
that are afraid of the epithet “pessimist,” 
and fear that, if they tell the truth, they 
will be classed by the public with the fail¬ 
ures and “good-for-naughts” of earth. 6. 
The narrow-minded folk that find it easy to 
be cheerful on a good fixed income, and 
wonder what the other fellow has to com¬ 
plain of. These six classes contain a host 
of people, and they are not slow of speech. 
They are so convincing that the farmer is 
puzzled by his lack of funds for needed im¬ 
provements. They are false leaders of their 
fellow men. 
The average farmer, as we meet him, 
looks at the question from two points of 
view—personal and political. Ask him 
whether hr personally is richer than he 
was three years ago, and he will usually 
say no. Ask him if the farmers of the 
country have grown richer, and he will 
answer according to whether he belongs 
to the “ins” or the “outs” in politics. 
Irrigating Schemes. —Farmers east 
of the Mississippi River take little in¬ 
terest in the schemes for irrigating the 
arid regions of the West. As a rule, 
they are opposed to any scheme for 
opening fresh land for cultivation, be¬ 
cause they have suffered already seri¬ 
ously from the opening of vast tracts of 
Government land. West of the Missis¬ 
sippi, however, this irrigation question 
is of great importance. The National 
Irrigation Congress meets regularly, and 
discusses the question with considerable 
feeling. Two policies are represented in 
this Congress. One side want the Gov¬ 
ernment to build federal storage reser¬ 
voirs in the mountains, the work to be 
done at public expense. The other side 
would turn the arid lands over to the 
various States, to do with them as the 
State authorities see fit. We may safely 
say that any scheme for using the pub¬ 
lic money for building these storage 
reservoirs and opening new lands for 
cultivation, would be strongly opposed 
at the East. Eastern farmers are pretty 
well satisfied that there is too much 
land under cultivation at the present 
time. They think it far better to take 
better care of the land already under 
the plow than to open millions of new 
acres in the Far West. 
“But when is the best time for culti¬ 
vating to save moisture?” 
Prof. King, in his articles on the soil, 
said that, during the night, moisture is 
brought up into the layer ot mulch by 
capillarity from below. It is, probably, 
true that, on some nights, a little mois¬ 
ture is condensed from the air as dew. 
“Why, then, is it not best to cultivate 
late in the day to hold this moisture?” 
“There may be something in this,” 
said Prof. King. “But by cultivating 
early in the day, this moisture would, 
part of it, at least, be saved by develop¬ 
ing a better mulch early, so as to dimin¬ 
ish the rate of evaporation during the 
rest of the day.” 
“But on the other hand, woula not we 
lose water by cultivating?” 
“Yes, it is true that more or less of 
the deeper wet mulch is exposed to the 
surface, and the dry soil is turned down 
by cultivating early. By bringing wet 
soil to the surface, more moisture would 
be lost by early cultivation than by a 
later cultivation, when there is less 
moisture in the soil at the depth you 
stir it.” 
“Have you ever experimented with 
this matter?” 
“No, I have never tried to measure the 
loss of moisture due to early or late 
cultivation. I should not, however, ex¬ 
pect to find any great advantage. In 
general, it would be a matter of con-* 
venience largely, and certainly the 
morning cultivation is better for killing 
weeds.” 
For the best in the Nursery Line, both 
FRUITS and ORNAMENTALS 
Roses, Plants, Bulbs, Seeds, 
and at prices to suit the times, consult 
The Storrs & Harrison Co., 
Box 569 Painesville, Ohio. 
4f>th year. 44 greenhouses 1000 acres. 
Corres|K>ndence solicited. Catalogue free. 
Pedigree Strawberries 
Recommended to all strawberry (trowels by Rural 
Nbw-Yorkkk March II,’99, and praised by it July 17, 
’97 and July 16, ’98. WeotTe JOB,CARRIE SILVERS, 
STELLA and REBA in pot-grown plants at 25o each, 
$2 per do i.. 15 per UK); and ROBBIE and NETTIE, the 
best late strawberries yet introduced, at 25c. each, $2 
per doz , $6 per 100. Plants to be all pot-grown and to 
be delivered after July 1st. Order quick; stock limited 
JOS. H. BLACK. SON & CO., Hightstown, N. J. 
100 POTTED 
PARKER EARLE for *1. 
T. C, KKVITT, Athenla, N. J. 
P rime Stock Celery Plants, fl per 1,000, 25c. per 
100, by mail. We guarantee sat sfaction. 
SLAYMAKKlt & SON, Dover. DeL Circular Free 
POTTED STRAWBERRY PLANTS.— 
All the new and standard kinds. Lowest prices. 
«_ l> CIHi'FW Pacoold V T 
NEW 
(Trade-marked.) 
MURDY PLUM and 
DIAMOND PEACH. 
and finest 
FRUITS 
NEW PEACHES. 
(Copyrighted.) 
Dean’s Red, Dan Boone, 
Deaconess St St. Clair. 
THE ALBAUCH NURSERY AND ORCHARD CO., 
Phoneton, Ohio. 
When to Cultivate. —“What is the 
best time of day for cultivating?” 
Most farmers will say without hesita¬ 
tion, that to kill the weeds, an early 
morning of a bright sunshiny day is 
best. On such a day, the weeds are 
turned up to the sun early, and are not 
merely transplanted, as they would be 
if left in the shade or given a night in 
which to recover. 
CELERY PLANTS. 
All the eadingvariet'fs: strongtield plants;$2 and 
13 per 1,000. WM. S. HERZOG, Morristown, N. J. 
CELERY 
PLANTS_*1 50 per thousand 
J. C. ELLIS, Millsboro, Del. 
CELERY PLANTS FOR SALE 
Leading varieties, carefully packed In baskets, 
and delivered here at Express Offices; 2E0 plants for 
G0c.; 500 for 90c : 1,000 for $1.50. Special price on 
quantities ov r 6.010. Cash with order. 
WOODLAND FARM, Canastota, Madison Co., N.Y. 
POT 
CROWN 
STRAWBERRIES 
We shall have our usual 
supply of tine plants ready 
about July 15th. Catalogue 
’containing"correct descriptions of the best varieties with cultural directions mailed on request. 
ELLWANCER & BARRY, Mount Hope Nurseries, R ° 
Pf Pot-Grown “*1 
Strawberry Plants 
Planted this summer will produce a FULL CROP 
of berries next June. 
Our Mid-Summer catalogue justout offers plants 
of the best of the new and old varieties of 
STRAWBERRIES, 
CELERY, CAIIBAOE, CAULIFLOWER 
and BRUSSELS SPROUTS, 
as well as seasonable Flower and Vegetable Seeds, 
Lawn Mowers, Lawn Sprinklers, etc., etc. 
Will send you a copy FREE for the asking. 
HENRY A. DREER, 
714 Chestnut St., 
Philadelphia, Pa. 
