Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 58.djvu/229

Rh the soy bean plants produced root tubercles abundantly, indicating that they were drawing their nitrogen from the air. Local soil which had once been inoculated and produced a crop of soy beans was found to be suitable material for inoculating other soils; and a practical method for treating large fields has been worked out and tested through several seasons. The result is especially important as the soy bean is well suited to a wide range of country, and aside from being a valuable forage crop its growth materially enriches the soil.

recent announcements of the census bureau, which have been widely circulated in the daily press, throw light on a sociological question often discussed. It has been said that the course of population is toward the great cities, that the metropolis is swallowing up the county centers and small cities. A recent prophet of the future made the England of his fiction a single great city with the rest of the country as its farm and garden. Some alarm has been caused lest this supposed tendency to centralization of population prove disastrous to nervous health and moral welfare. It now appears that such a tendency does not exist. For the eighty-one small cities, those of from 25,000 to 50,000, have increased during the last decade practically as fast as the nineteen great cities of over 200,000, namely, about 32 per cent. New York, it is true, has increased 37.8 per cent. The rate of increase of the cities above 25,000 is about 11 per cent, higher than that of the country at large, but there is no cause for sociologists to lament this difference. The inhabitants of the hundred and twenty cities under 100,000 have in many ways a superior intellectual and moral environment. They are freed from the petty annoyances of rural life, its isolation from broadening institutions and its emptiness of appeal to ambition, without losing outdoor freedom or the chance of participation in community life. They enjoy the good schools, libraries, entertainments, the municipal improvements, the services of superior professional men, etc., of great cities, without suffering from metropolitan restrictions, abuses and vices. The small city is in a measure the golden mean among dwelling-places. It would be interesting to observe on a large scale the magnitude of another great movement in population, that connected with the growth of suburbs. The natural supposition is that the rate of increase of the suburbs has been very much above the average even of the cities. In so far as the nature of our surroundings determines our make-up, such new conditions as we have in suburban life are of vital interest to the student of human nature.

growth of interest in forestry, one of the youngest of the applied sciences, is attested by the establishment this year of the Yale Forest School, which confers the degree of Master of Forestry on graduates who have obtained the bachelor's degree elsewhere. At the opening of the school there were registered seven regular students, besides seventeen from other departments of the University. The residence of the late Professor O. C. Marsh is used as a school building. Lecture-rooms, a library, a laboratory and an herbarium room have been furnished with such equipment as has been found necessary for the present requirements of the school. A considerable amount of museum material has already been acquired and is being classified and arranged as rapidly as possible. The grounds about the building, ten acres in extent, are already covered with a great variety of trees and shrubs, both native and foreign, and it is the intention to plant a considerable number of varieties which are not represented. A forest nursery will be established on the grounds, but the regular forest planting will be done on waste land on the outskirts of New Haven. The New Haven Water Company has offered to the school the use of several hundred acres