Page:The National Geographic Magazine Vol 16 1905.djvu/65

Rh whose gardens now yield from eight to ten thousand pounds of tea annually. The work of establishing a plantation in Texas has also been continued. En- couraging results have also been secured in the establishment of the African date in Arizona and California.

In Vermont previous success in growing opium poppies has been repeated with even better results. The attempt to cultivate this plant has been made with a view to supplying our demand for poppy alkaloids for medicinal uses. As the result of the repeated experi- ments, success has at last attended the effort to obtain morphine directly from the juices of the plant. If this can be done commercially, the plants produced in American fields will replace oriental opium as a crude source for morphine.

Special work has been done on cotton with a view to bringing home to farmers of Texas and Louisiana, especially in the boll-weevil districts, the advantages of better methods of cultivation and the value of early maturing seed.

The Bureau of Plant Industry has had the advantage of closest cooperation with the Texas Agricultural College, and also with the Louisiana authorities. As a feature of the work in the South, diversification farms were established at various places with a view to showing the value and importance of diversified agriculture. The business interests in the respective communities gladly co- operate in this matter with the Bureau, so that they involve but a trifling ex- pense to the government. Thirty-two of these farms have been or are about to be established. Extensive work has been inaugurated in Texas with a view to breeding new types of cotton better adapted to meet the conditions brought about by the invasion of the cotton boll weevil. Reference is made to the dis- covery of the Guatemalan ant by an officer of the Bureau, and to the trans- fer of the study and distribution of this ant to the Bureau of Entomology. Men- tion is also made of an effort to combat the boll weevil by producing a variety of cotton not subject to injury by this pest.

The Secretary believes it to be within the range of possibility that resistant varieties of cotton may be found in tropical America or developed by selec- tion. As a feature of the work in Texas, a special effort has been made to obtain information as to the best methods of combating the cotton root rot, a disease which has been very serious the past season.

More attention has been given to al- falfa in the eastern half of the United States in the past two years than to any other crop. The department has dem- onstrated that this valuable crop can be grown in almost every state in the Union. A large amount of information has been gathered the past year as to the carrying capacity of the ranges in vari- ous parts of the West. Intelligent man- agement will bring the ranges back to their primitivs state of productiveness, but there is no chance of improving range conditions except where stockmen are able to control the ranges upon which their stock feed. It has also been demonstrated that many new plants may be introduced upon the range success- fully. Plants that may be grown upon alkali lands have been studied.

Investigations of standard grasses have been carried on, and it is hoped that within a few years it will be possible to offer farmers small quantities of seed of improved forms of all the standard grasses. A considerable number of na- tive American grasses have shown them-