tions at the end of each year, which examination includes a drawing, which is graded according to the year, it being more difficult with each examination. Each set of examination papers has to be approved by the master mechanic and by the superintendent of motive power before the boy is granted his increase in pay. Any apprentice failing in his examination is set back and given a second trial, but failing in the second trial is discharged. In order to give apprentices every advantage the company has opened night schools for boys.

A drawing class is instituted at each terminal, running between the months of October and April, two classes being held each week, at which attendance on the part of the boys is compulsory. The company furnishes the instructor, the room, lighting, heating and everything but the drawing instruments. The instructor has the names of all apprentices and calls the roll, reporting the absentees to the master mechanic, who requires a good excuse from each apprentice who has failed to attend. In cases where the boys do not. attend the classes regularly without any substantial reason they are discharged. As an additional inducement to the boys to exert themselves, in the spring of the year local prizes are given and competed for by apprentices of the different years all over the system.

Mr. Robb has arranged to give each boy

a certificate at the completion of his apprenticeship. This year, in addition to the teaching of drawing at the regular classes, they are giving the boys lessons in elementary mechanics, which will be an additional source of education and should materially assist in turning out compe

tent men.

Of course boys can not be expected to look far into the future. The night school was very attractive at first, but the average boy prefers skating to sketching and drawing. The boys began to lose interest, and it was decided to make the school a part of the day's work, a part of the business, and the moment the boys were given that view of the matter they became interested. They require to have with them at all times the dread of punishment and the hope of reward, not too much of either but a little of both. Under such circumstances the average boy will "make good."

As further incentive to individual effort, Mr. Hays, who has been the working head of the Grand Trunk System on this side of the Atlantic, and is the originator of the Grand Trunk Pacific, is now offering as a grand prize, two scholarships in McGill College. In this way two employees of the mechanical department will, each year, be awarded a full-paid scholarship which will enable them to pursue their studies in that splendid educational institution.

AN AL

-22°

Perfecting the Tobacco Plant

By Frederick W. Coburn

A RECENT writer in THE

WORLD TO-DAY has stated, as an example of the alleged "decadence" of rural New England, that the tobacco raised annually in a small section of the Connecticut Valley exceeds in value the entire cotton yield of the State of Georgia or the wheat crop of Illinois. A few thousand acres of land in a little district of central Connecticut and Massachusetts have for many years back been producing one of the most valued harvests of the United States. The region available for tobacco cultivation is limited in area. Too near the sea the plants grow coarse and "weedy." Too far from it they lack size and vitality. The district about the cities of Hartford and Springfield is the only one among the North Atlantic States that has thus far been found to offer ideal conditions. Here the first cigars ever rolled in the United States were made more than a century ago by a Mrs. Prout, wife of a South Windsor farmer who peddled her invention up and down the state in a cart, and on this land, rich naturally and consistently fertilized, tobacco has been an increasingly valuable product ever since.

This is the battleground where the fight for the perfect cigar is being conducted, and just now some of the most important experiments ever carried on for the improvement of the weed are in operation in the Connecticut Valley. Here an effort is being made virtually to eliminate the disagreeable and dangerous nicotine by reducing the proportion of it in prepared tobacco from four or five to perhaps one per cent. The endeavor is to produce a constant type of practically perfect tobacco plant, so that the farmer can rely year after year upon raising a crop free from accidental variations. The means taken to accomplish this end involve work which in its way is hardly less interesting than the experimentation with fruits that has made Luther Burbank internationally famous.

Visitors to the tobacco country last

A FIELD OF PERFECT "BROAD LEAF"

summer were often surprised to note in the fields that the long stems of the seed plants-those whose heads have not been lopped off earlier in the season to allow the full strength of the plant to go into the leaves-were covered with caps which on examination proved to be ordinary Manila paper bags tied tightly around the scarlet and white flowers of the plant. Inquiry disclosed that the practice has grown out of experiments lately conducted in the region by Professor A. D. Shamel, of the Bureau of Plant Industry of the United States Department of Agriculture. The farmer has determined what type of tobacco plant is fittest to survive, and he is helping along the survival. Enclosed in a paper sack each flower is obliged to reproduce itself without interference from outside. What this obligation means is readily understood by anybody who is acquainted with the simplest facts of botany.

The paper bags are used, of course, to secure self-fertilization instead of crossfertilization. Each tobacco flower has five stamens which contain pollen dust or grains, the male fertilizing element of the plant. If these drop into the pistil, or

receptive female part, the plant is said to be self-fertilized, and the resultant seeds will produce a plant which is exactly like the single parent. If, on the other hand, a wandering bee brings pollen. from some other plant in the same or a neighboring field, and deposits it in the pistil, cross-fertilization is the result, and if the second plant belongs to a different variety from the seeds thus formed, there appears a hybrid, a plant in which the characteristics of separate types are mingled. Cross-fertilization, it is easily seen, leads to all manner of accidental and often undesirable results, for the insect which seeks the honey in the corolla. may introduce pollen from the scraggliest and poorest plants in the neighborhood.

The principle on which the Connecticut farmers work is simple. In every field of successful tobacco there appear some plants of unusual weight, size and beauty. The grower selects a dozen or so of these for seeding, but instead of leaving them exposed, he caps their heads carefully. If this process is repeated, only the very best plants being selected, the result at the end of three or four years, so Professor Shamel says, will be to secure a seed productive of plants as nearly perfect as the conditions of the soil and climate will allow.

This work of the Department of Agriculture is being carried on at Hockanum, Connecticut, in in charge of Professor Shamel and Mr. Vincent C. Brewer, the son of a successful tobacco grower who has specialized in the biology of plant life at Trinity College. It has consisted up to this time very largely in capping plants of the old broad-leaf variety of tobacco, that which before 1874, when the Havana plant was introduced, was the staple in the Connecticut Valley. During the growth of the plants, field notes are taken and are written on the Manila bags tied to the stalks of the plants.

Shortly after a plant has been selected for purposes of seeding, most or all of the leaves are stripped from the stalks. The taking of the field notes continues. These are afterward copied into a record supplied by the plant-breeding laboratory of the Department of Agriculture. In this final computation there appears an exhaustive life history of each plant, in which all the facts are set down regarding the shape of leaves, the venation, the appearance of "rust" or leaf spots, the amount of gum present and the time of maturity.

What most surprises the layman in all this cultivation is the almost mechanical uniformity with which the offspring of

self-fertilized tobacco plants exactly reproduce the parental characteristics. For example, Professor Shamel summer before last capped two tobacco plants which in outward appearance were as nearly exactly alike as two plants well could be. The only difference noted was that one of them ripened about a week later than the other. The resultant offspring last summer were to outward appearances precisely similar, but presented the same peculiarity that the plants from the one set of seeds ripened just seven days later than those from the other set. In other words, there are no accidents of heredity when the varieties of the weed are carefully protected.

Latest reports from state food commissioners and the United States Agricultural Department as to frauds practiced are astounding, and the wonder is that we live if we partake of some of the "fraud foods." Most of us would be horrified if asked to eat iron filings, sawdust, sand, anilin dyes, wood alcohol, charred matter, olive stones, husks, bark, et cetera, yet this is what really happens if we use the preparations of dishonest firms. The New York Health Department recently sent a large quantity of cheap baking powder to Riker's Island, where it was used for filling in, as it contained thirty per cent of pulverized rock, a very interesting commentary on a kind of adulteration suitable for such a purpose.

State laws have been enacted, but not always enforced. Food laboratories for the purpose of guarding against the importation of adulterated and improperly labeled and highly colored food stuffs from foreign countries have been established in New York, San Francisco and Chicago, and there are others to be opened in Philadelphia and New Orleans.