Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 92.djvu/599

 Popular Scioicc Monthly

��583

��Novel Application of the Service Flag Idea on a Girl's Belt

ONE of the latest applications of the service flag idea was displayed recently in public by Miss Evelyn Grieg of New York and attracted favor- able attention. Upon her broad patent leather belt she displayed four stars in token of the patriotic devotion of four members of her immediate family wh 3 have joined up to help make the world safe for democracy.

Orange Tree Made Riverside Rich

IN 1872, United States Consul to Bahia, Brazil, Mr. W. F. Judson, was told by the natives that some sixty miles inland, up the Amazon, were native orange trees bearing fruit without seeds. Accordingly he sent natives after tree shoots and some of the fruit. The shoots were packed in moss and clay and sent to Washington. They were set out by the Agricultural Depart- ment, but attracted little attention until

���© li,d.r>xoo.l :,ih1 Und

Belt advertising relatives one has

��the next year, when Horatio Tibbetts, of

Riverside, California, took the surviving

four shoots to his home and planted

them. One died and another was

eaten up by a cow. At the end of

live years the two surviving trees

bore sixteen handsome seedless

oranges. Next year the

oranges were even better,

and the trees bore

about a box of the

fruit.

From that time on the cultivation of the seedless oranges about Riverside progressed rapidly. As there were no seeds to raise the trees from, it was found necessary to graft buds of the seed- less trees into seed- ling trees.

Riverside has grown from a small village to a town of fifteen thousand people, and has twenty thousand acres devoted to the cultivation of navel oranges. It is the greatest orange producing locality in the world. The two original trees were fenced about and carefully guarded lest harm should come to them, and they are now enjoying a green old age. One of them is shown herewith.

��the number of in the services

���The grandfather of navel oranges. One of the two original seedless orange trees

��Heavy .\rtillery Is the Correct Weapon for Shooting Canaries

DURING some recent mining opera- tions beneath the German trenches, some canaries were, as usual, taken into the excavation to indicate the presence of noxious gases. One of these little song- sters escaped and flew to the middle of "No Man's Land," where he perched on a shrub and began to sing. Fearful that the Germans would notice him and so discover that mining operations were going on, the British opened fire on him, but he seemed to bear a charmed life. The sharpshooters tried to "get" him, and the rank and file took pot-shots at him, but still the liquid notes flowed over the landscape. Finally, in desperation, he was fired on with trench guns and a well-placed shell obliterated bird and bush and song.

�� �