Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 51.djvu/686

670 farmers' crops and stock. To study these dangers, to devise means to avoid them, to discover cures for those plants which are attacked by disease, are the tasks which the vegetable pathologist has before him.

Agriculture and horticulture are simply the practical applications of principles defined by the study of vegetable physiology. Questions as to the suitability of certain soils for certain crops are answered by the practical farmer, who scorns the aid which the scientific man might give him, by such expensive experiments as sowing the area in question with the seeds of the crop which he hopes to reap. If the crop is a good one, the farmer rejoices; if he gets but a trifling return for his season's labor, he grumbles at his luck, or wants the Government to order a bounty, or to pass a prohibitory tariff. The market-gardener should know now as the result of the published investigations of vegetable physiologists at agricultural experiment stations, that some of the vegetables and fruits which bring the highest prices when marketed out of season can be brought to perfection much earlier when grown not only in sunlight by day, but under the electric light by night. Lettuce, for example, can be marketed about two weeks sooner after planting if illuminated day and night.

The horticulturist daily proves by producing various and often striking varieties of flowers or fruits the falsity of the old notions as to the fixity of living organisms. I must confess that it seems to me rather disrespectful, some persons might say rather impious, so to tamper with the natural or "divinely appointed" forms of plants, as to produce the monstrous chrysanthemums which we may see in exhibitions or in private houses. But these exaggerated and often extremely ugly because so artificial forms are the strongest evidences that the organic world, of which we are a part, is extremely plastic still in spite of its age; and that those factors which have accomplished the evolution of present complexity from primitive simplicity are still operative, and that man as well as other organisms has not yet reached his final and highest development.

I wish to say one word of that aspect of botanical science which is still but little regarded in our country, but which, if our successors are to have any forests, must receive due and practical notice. I mean the science of forestry. In Germany especially, but in other European countries also, there are forestry schools, where young men receive that scientific and many-sided training which will fit them properly to administer the private and Government wooded lands. It is an interesting fact that, great as is the expense in maintaining these schools and in managing the forests, yet the forests of Germany are one of the most profitable properties of the Government. The railroads pay a trifling interest still,