but of course only the interesting phases and the changes in life were taken.

First the snow-white moth was pictured laying its two hundred eggs. Under natural conditions the insect dies after performing this function. As a result, the taking of this set of photographs entailed a long vigil, since it was very difficult to discover when the moth was about to deposit the eggs, and it was necessary for the camera, lights, and microscope to be in readiness constantly.

In natural life, the eggs are laid in the late summer, and remain dormant during the cool winter months until spring. The

after the fourth moulting. The cocoon is valuable commercially only before the moth has eaten its way out of the little ball, and so once the cocoon is spun, the worm on the inside is killed, and the silk is gathered. If undisturbed, the moth emerges after a period of about four weeks, and the life cycle is complete. These chief events are those which the camera has caught.

When the work of picturing the life history of thirty different insects is complete, science will have a visual record of what has, in the past, been described only by the pen and the "still" photograph, in

P

EOPLE laughed heartily at
Harlan K. Whitney, a civil
engineer of Battle Creek,
Michigan, two years ago, when

he bought from fifteen to twenty acres of the most useless land in the city, and said he would reclaim. it by the use of hydraulics. The property was about evenly divided between rolling hills and squashy marshes, and the chances seemed as one thousand to one that the venturesome innovator was facing a gigantic failure.

But today the hills have been dumped in the marshes and leveled off, and Whitney has opened a new addition to the city, less than threequarters of a mile from the business district and a block from the nearest car-line. In considerably less time than it took to work the transformation, six city blocks will be quite generally built up on what has, since the founding of

this town in the early '30's, been considered as absolutely waste land.

Reduced to figures, Whitney has moved 125,000 yards of earth, grading nearly twenty acres. More than half of this acreage consisted of hills, some as high as 265 feet.

The device used for the purpose was simple-so simple, in fact, as to cause ridicule. Two two-inch streams from an eight-inch well, pumped at first by a traction engine, were directed at the gravel and sand of the hills, with a pressure of twenty-five pounds at the nozzle. Later a two-stage centrifugal pump was established for the same purpose. The water was pumped sometimes as far as six hundred feet, sheetiron sluices carrying away the used liquid, with the sand and gravel driven before it, to any place desired. For a long time the water was turned back into the well, allowed to settle and then

pumped over again. Whitney was economical, as well as venturesome; he had to be, because he was not a man of means.

After the water became too muddy, it was drained off. The fact that the grade from the hills to the low land was great made it possible for the earth to be moved by water pressure alone. Without this feature, Whitney would have been forced to resort to the costly and wearisome process of moving it by teams-a method which would have wrecked his modest finances. The working force on this

project never exceeded five men, and a few teams.

Whitney has now reached the point where he may expect to reap the profit. He paid only a moderate price for the land, as nobody else wanted it or would have it, at any price. Now the fifteen to twenty acres of "worthless" land is divided into a hundred desirable city lots, and the total valuation should be around one hundred thousand dollars. It is hard to prophesy what it will mean to Whitney financially, but it should convert him from a poor civil engineer into a man of wealth.

T

ESTS recently made by Dr. H. H. Rusby, Dean of the Columbia University College of Pharmacy, have shown that in addition to its marvelous curative powers, radium is a powerful stimulant in plant growth and crop production. Not only is the yield of many vegetables much increased by its use, but their table qualities are also wonderfully. improved, while lawns have also been greatly benefited, and the size and brilliancy of garden and hot-house flowers. remarkably increased.

Dr. Rusby's experiments and observations included the winter culture of radishes in a market gardener's greenhouse, some seedlings in window boxes in his own home, field crops covering more than one hundred acres at Northfield, Ohio, under the direction of Mr. W. W. Darley, an experimental garden at Pittsburgh, and a plantation of an acre and a half at Nutley, N. J., of which Dr. Rusby himself had immediate personal

The use of pure radium would, of course, be impossible in this connection. But fortunately for the commercial future of the work, it was found that this phenomenally expensive material need not be used. A finely powdered residue remains after all the radium possible has been extracted from the ore, and this residue has enough radium for the work.

The greenhouse radishes, which were first experimented upon, yielded the most surprising results. They were about an inch high when the powdered radium ore. was applied, sixteen grains to the square foot, or at the rate of about fifty pounds to the acre, by being sown in little furrows scratched midway between the rows. A square yard was thus treated, while for purposes of comparison, an exactly similar plot, about ten feet away, was left untreated.

The radishes in the treated plot soon appeared much inferior to those in the one not treated, their tops being smaller, as though stunted. But a surprise was

vested. It was then found, upon weighing separately the green tops and the roots from each plot, that, while the tops of those in the radium plot weighed seventeen per cent less than those in the other, the radishes themselves weighed twenty per cent more. This was all the more remarkable in view of the fact that during almost the entire period of growth there was a minimum of sunshine, due to stormy weather.

Experiments with turnips verified another important result that the work with the radishes had indicated would occurnamely, that the larger the amount of root buried in the soil, and thus exposed to the action of the emanations, the greater will be the gain in that crop. The reason for this is simple enough. The entire plant becomes radio-active and this activity resides in the contained.

water. Consequently, the more root surface a plant has buried in the soil, the more radio-active water it is capable of absorbing. This water continuously stimulates all the cells with which it is in contact.

Furthermore, many of the radium experiments succeeded during a season of growth that was almost entirely devoid of rain. At the time of collection, in middle October, the foliage on the control plots-that is, the plots without

DR. H. H. RUSBY He is working out economical methods of using in agriculture the beneficial properties of radio-active materials.

radium was completely dead and dry, while on the radium treated plants there was green and living foliage in proportion to the amount of radium used. This indicates that radium increases the plant's resistance to drought.

Another interesting feature of Dr. Rusby's observations was the effect of radium upon certain plant diseases and insect enemies. An unusual amount of

wet weather in the early part of the summer caused an increased tendency to rot in the tomatoes and egg-plants. But, while the plants in the plots containing little or no radium suffered severely, those in the heavily treated plots were comparatively free of the disease.

Cabbages were heavily attacked by cut-worms, about a third of the plants being cut off in the control plot. But in the plot with fifty pounds of radium ore residue to the acre, the number of plants destroyed was much smaller, while in the plots with one hundred and two hundred pounds only one plant was lost in each. Dr. Rusby states that at first. it did not appear to him possible that this difference was due to the presence of radium. A short time later, however,

he realized the importance of the observation, when informed by a man who had applied radio-active earth to his lawn in Virginia, that it was the only lawn in the vicinity that had not suffered from cut-worms.

A summary of Dr. Rusby's experiments proves beyond all doubt that the yield of most crops can be increased by the use of radium, the amount used depending upon the nature of the crop. Also, the beneficial effects not only continue over successive crops, but will probably last for many years. And the largest amount of radium required by any crop, according to Dr. Rusby, would cost less than the increased market value of such crop of the first year, so that later increases would be pure again.

P

OPULAR conception seldom pictures a public service corporation with its eye aimed in any direction except toward the Almighty Dollar; but, in at least one Western State-Utah-a corporation appears also to have "an eye for beauty". This particular company has given to Ogden Canyon-a great natural, mountain gorge of surpassing grandeur -an artificial waterfall which is said to be the largest in the world. The sight provokes gasps of admiration from thousands of tourists, while the townspeople of Ogden point to the fall with pride as the only "two-million-dollar waterfall" in the world.

Ogden Canyon, in itself, is one of the wonders of the West. Towering cliffs Towering cliffs of jagged grandeur provide eight miles of wonderful mountain scenery, while a beautiful stream wanders about among

MEIGHAN

beneath the walls. A splendid macadam road and an electric railroad make these beauties accessible to all.

Then the "soulless" corporation threatened to spoil all this, with its dollarproducing structures. Six miles above the mouth of the canyon it placed a gigantic dam, impounding enough water at flood season to insure a year-round supply for generating 8,000 horsepower. A pipe of six-foot inside diameter carries the water by natural fall from the dam to the generating plant six miles below.

Ordinarily, such structures militate against beauty. But in this case, the corporation was not blind to the scenic possibilities of the situation. Upon the earnest recommendation of an official of the company, the pipe line was tapped just above the mouth of the canyon for overflow waste purposes and to supply a canal company with water, and a heavy stream