bearing upon the problems offered for study.

Car No. 2, which is the museum, contains these and other exhibits, including eleven models representing as many different kinds of good roads. There is, in miniature, an earth road; likewise a gravel road, a sand-clay road, a plain macadam road, several forms of bituminous macadam-tar, oil and asphaltand a brick road. Different forms of standard construction are shown, and,

There is a miniature working

model of a three-wheeled steam roller, exactly like a big one, in operation on a model road. An electric shoe that runs along one side of the little road, concealed beneath a slot, carries a current which causes the roller to move slowly up and down the road. Nothing could be more convincing.

Along both sides of the museum car are big photographs showing roads before and after improvement, according to various approved modes of construction. Thus there is an instructive picture gal

lery to supplement the models, the signifi

cance of the latter be

ing rendered more obvious

by cardboard placards.

Coach No. 3 is the lecture car,

and on board of it is installed an electric stereopticon, operated by wires from the generator in the first coach, by which views illustrative of methods of road-building are thrown upon a screen. For this purpose a sheet is hung across the middle of the car, the audience being seated on both sides of it. The pictures look just the same from both sides, except that, if there happens to be any reading matter on them, it runs backward from the viewpoint of half the spectators.

It often happens that a good many more than eighty people want to hear the lecture and see the magic lantern pictures -in which case the car is emptied at the termination of the entertainment, and a fresh audience of auditors is admitted. H. C. Wells and J. W. Janssen, both of

ture given has a direct relation to the locality. Thus, if there is no rock in the neighborhood for road building, the discussion is of sand, clay, gravel, and ordinary earth as materials.

Coach No. 4 is relatively unimportant, merely furnishing living, sleeping and eating quarters for the representatives of the Office of Roads and other officers accompanying the expedition.

The train will cover the entire mileage of the Frisco system, having made its start from Brownsville because that is the farthest southern point and the weather is getting warmer. Ordinarily the stops are for only three or four hours at each point, the lecture occu

pying about fortyfive minutes.

The railroad

furnishes the locomotive

and cars, and runs the train at its own expense. Also, it installs the electric outfit. But the Federal and State officers pay the regular fare for the distance covered, and meet the cost of their own subsistence-incidentally, of course, providing the models, the stereopticon, and other exhibition material.

Wherever the Good Roads Special has stopped, it has met with an enthusiastic reception. In fact, the amount of popular interest aroused has been surprising. People have come in all sorts of conveyances for considerable distances to see the traveling exhibition and listen to the

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lectures. They have gone away not only instructed but edified, having grasped the idea of the importance of good roads as never before. At the same time, they have come to realize that the government, through its Department of Agriculture, is taking a serious interest in their welfare, and is anxious to help them. Inspired by the object lessons offered, they will in many instances form organizations of their own for the promotion of such improvements, and the outcome in a general way will be of substantial benefit to the population over a wide extent of territory.

S

EVEN years ago rice was a comparatively unknown quantity in the grain inventory of Arkansas. The original upland rice grower of that state did not quite go to the extent of trying the experiment in the family bath tub, but the neighbors laughed fully as much as though he had. He planted the seed in a little corner of the garden and kept the rice bed under water for weeks, carrying the water in a pail night after night. When the crop was harvested it wasn't more than enough to make croquettes for the average sized family, but the Stuttgart enthusiast who had worked so diligently took paper and pencil and soon proved that at that rate he could raise one hundred bushels to the acre, where Texas and Louisiana, with all their swamps and marshes and lowland rice

fields, were only producing between thirty and thirty-five bushels.

That was the beginning of upland rice growing in Arkansas. Today the Grand Prairie, a strip of country fifty miles wide and a hundred miles long in the north central part of the state, has practically one hundred thousand acres of upland devoted to rice, the yield ranging all the way from fifty to one hundred bushels to the acre. There isn't a state or a country doing as well and Arkansas grows its rice on high, dry lands. Arkansas rice growers are not getting web feet paddling around in marshy lowlands, although their bank accounts are growing as lowland rice growers' bank accounts were never known to grow.

One may

ride for hours past continuous fields devoted to rice and flooded by artificial means, thanks to the never-ending sup

ply of pure, sparkling water pumped from an inexhaustible underground source by means of the steam-driven wells with which the country is irrigated. This splendid water supply is the secret of success of the Arkansas rice growers. Water is invariably reached at a depth of from fifteen to forty feet.

The wells are sunk one hundred feet farther and pumps with coal, wood or gasoline fuel force the water to the surface and to a nearby reservoir from which it is distributed to the fields of growing rice. The pump is located on the highest ground on the farm and the reservoir, no larger than a

bedroom and only three or four feet deep, is made to catch the flow. A double furrow is thrown up around the area to be irrigated and the field thus enclosed is laid off in sections with the plow, each furrow marking a four-inch fall of the surface. Then a small ditch is plowed from the reservoir straight to the lower end of the farm, crossing the levees, which extend from the ditch at right angles. When a plot is to be irrigated a few shovelfuls of earth are thrown into the ditch at the intersection of the lower levee, and when the desired depth of water is secured the ditch is opened so

that the water can flow into the next section, and so on until the entire field is flooded, when the pumping is relaxed and the water thereafter is supplied only in a quantity to make up for seepage and evaporation.

Irrigation begins when the plant is from five to six inches high and continues until the maturity of the rice, a period of from seventy-five to ninety days. Then the ditch is opened at the lower end of the field and the water, which is of no further use, passes off, permitting the heaviest harvesting machinery to enter the field a few days later.

All this is in marked contrast with the primitive methods still prevailing in Oriental countries, in which most of the world's supply of rice is grown, for notwithstanding all its progress in ricegrowing in recent years the United States only raises one three-hundredfiftieth part of the world's crop. In Japan rice fields, the plow is rarely used. The soil is dug up and worked over with a mattock; the rice is sown in beds which are watered and carefully tended till the plants are six to ten inches high when they are taken up and transplanted in fields already submerged several inches with water. The rice is cut by hand with an instrument similar to a sickle, bound in small bundles and hung upon poles to dry, the threshing and the winnowing likewise being done by hand. The average yield per acre, after all this hard manual labor, is only about thirty bushels; while the Arkansas

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farmer, on his uplands fed by the underground water supply, never goes out into his submerged fields, never soils his hands transplanting and never harvests or threshes by hand, yet raises average crops fully twice that of the Jap's. The average cost of growing an acre of rice in Japan is $38.00-including labor, fertilizer, land tax and the other itemswhich makes each bushel of rice cost the Jap grower, at harvest, $1.29. In the meantime the Arkansas rice grower has been raising rice for six or seven years at an average acre cost of about $20.00, which has made his rice cost, at harvest, something like twenty-seven or thirty cents a bushel. There isn't much talk of "the yellow peril" in the Grand Prairie upland rice fields. The Jap has been beaten at his own game there.

But Arkansas is not content with beating the Jap and the rest of the world at growing rice. It is going to try the experiment of putting a brand new kind of rice on the market: unpolished rice. Heretofore the trade has demanded a highly polished rice, a grain from which not only the hull and the cuticle has been removed, but likewise the extreme outer surface of the rice grain itself; a grain, moreover, which has been dusted with

glucose and talc to give it a glossy coating. Now all this made for a much nicer looking rice than the grain as it comes from the scouring brushes, with the hull and thin cuti