Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 46.djvu/293

Rh a view to the greatest possible increase in seed production, and in the other for just the opposite purpose. In our cereals selections are made to produce the greatest amount of seed with the least possible amount of straw. To that end, in the best wheat-growing sections, the longest and best-filled heads are selected, and those, too, in which the grains are the heaviest, for seed purposes. The seed thus saved is given the greatest possible aid to reproduction by growing it on soil best adapted to its development; by giving each plant sufficient room to grow strong, rather than tall; and by furnishing plant food proportionate to its necessities. At the proper time, if the same careful selection is again made and the same care in cultivation given, there will result another marked improvement, both in size and productiveness of the grain. The operation, oft repeated, will establish a type superior to that from which the first selection was made. To preserve that type, the same care must be given that was necessary to produce it. In selection for vegetables, where seeds are only used to reproduce the plant, the opposite course must be pursued, and forms must be chosen that produce as little seed as possible. It has often been demonstrated that when any given type has been developed by selection, either rapidly or slowly, under favorable conditions of soil and climate, it will as rapidly revert when grown under reverse conditions. It is also true that any form that will materially revert when grown under changed conditions for a few years will proportionately change in one year. This will, in a measure, account for the deterioration of varieties where the stock seed has been grown under different conditions from those under which the type originated. In most instances one year's growth will not materially change a type, but in all cases where a type is to be preserved it requires the same care in selection and cultivation and other conditions as those under which it originated.

University Extension.—The American Society for the Extension of University Teaching looks upon the creation of a literature embodying the experience of the movement as a prime condition of its ultimate success. Such literature has been materially enriched during the last twelve months. The number of lecture courses given during 1893 was larger, and the number of people attending the courses was, in the aggregate, greater than in any previous year. An appreciable advance has been made toward bringing home the benefits of university extension to some classes of society who have for the most part thus far stood aloof from it. The society's net receipts for the year were $8,119. The programme for the last year included lecture courses on a variety of subjects in history and literature, and "class courses" on subjects in which civics and physiology and hygiene played a conspicuous part. "It is in these days of newspapers, cheap story papers, labor unions, and similar agencies," says the report, "not a question of culture or no culture; it is a question of culture of the right sort, obtained under the guidance of properly qualified teachers, or culture of the wrong sort, under the guidance of uneducated and interested parties. Which shall it be? The socialist, the anarchist, the fanatic is to-day supplying systematic culture to a large and increasing number of our population. Shall some counteracting agency be kept at work or not? No one can study the extension movement carefully, investigate what it accomplishes for individuals and communities, without becoming convinced that even if it were to go no further than providing isolated courses of lectures upon the various branches of human culture, which should be given now in one place and now in another, occurring one winter and dropping out the next, it would still be eminently worth support and maintenance."

Palæography.—Palæography—the art of identifying, comparing, and deciphering ancient manuscripts—is founded on our knowledge and experience of the development of modern forms of writing. Children at school learning to write from the same copy form hands much alike, which become differentiated according to the individual characters of the several pupils, while they still bear the marks of a common style. "Any one," says Mr. E. M. Thompson, in his Greek and Latin Palæography (published in the International Scientific Series), "will readily distinguish the handwritings of individuals of his