The experiments are most important, and we are probably on the eve of as great advances in agriculture as in electricity, but the human race has a great love for “inoculation,” and indeed for all unnatural processes.

You remember the story of the wonderful coon that Chandler Harris tells?  No?  They were constantly seeing this enormous coon, but always just as they almost got their hands on him, he disappeared.  One night the boys came running in to say that the wonderful coon was up in a persimmon tree in the middle of a ten-acre lot; so they got the dogs and the lanterns and guns and ran out, and sure enough they saw the wonderful big coon up in a fork of the tree.  It was a bright moonlight night, but to make doubly sure they cut down the tree and the dogs ran in—­the coon wasn’t there.

“Well, but, Uncle Remus,” said the little boy, “I thought you said you saw the coon there.”

" So we did, Honey,” said the old man, “so we did; but it’s very easy to see what ain’t there when you’re looking for it.”

Another method of increasing fertility at increased expense deserves notice.  The vacant public lands are for the most part desert-like, and their utilization can come about only through irrigation.

This land can be made to produce the finest crops in the world; and the tremendous volumes of water that flow from the mountains to the sea, once harnessed and piped or ditched to this land, will transform it into beautiful gardens and farms.

With the work being done by the United States Government, and that of the various states, we may look forward in the not distant future to this land being made habitable to man.

It is well known that with the dry, even climate and with an abundance of water applied as vegetation needs, this now arid waste is far more productive than the Eastern states, where the crops are at the mercy of the elements, sometimes having too much moisture and at other times not having enough.

“Irrigation offers control of conditions such as is found nowhere except in greenhouse culture.  The farmer in the humid country cannot control the amount of starch in potatoes, sugar in beets, protein in corn, gluten in wheat, except by planting varieties which are especially adapted to the production of the desired quality.  The irrigation farmer, on the other hand, can produce this or that desirable quality by the control of the moisture supply to the plant.  He can hasten or retard maturity of the plant, produce early truck or late truck on the same soil, grow wheat or grow rice as he deems advisable.”

“On the irrigated fields of the Vosges, Vaucluse, etc., in France, six tons of dry hay becomes the rule, even upon ungrateful soil; and this means considerably more than the annual food of one milch cow (which can be taken as a little less than five tons) grown on each acre.”