While he was busy doing these things, the years sped along until 1907. By this time Charles Saunders, at Ottawa, had tested and retested those hybrid wheats until only a few of the best remained. The flour of all of these, each ground separately in a small mill, made good bread. The plants were stiff strawed and ripened early; the grain did not shatter when the heads were ripe. But before they could go out to the farmers they must be tried at the western experimental stations.

So, early in 1907, Mackay received several sacks, each holding about a half bushel of seed and each labelled with a different name. By this time planting new wheats was an old story to Mack-ay. While still hopeful, he had been disappointed too many times to be overly enthusiastic. Again the stage was set for a demonstration like that of the summer fallow that had proved to be so useful many years before.

Spring opened unusually late. In April, when the planting should have begun, the ground was hard with frost. All over Canada the seed wheat was weeks late going into the ground, and at the Indian Head farm, with many other things pressing to be planted, these small lots of wheat were not seeded until a month after the usual planting time. Even with this late start, all might have been well if July and August had been bright and warm, but when the plants should have been growing the fastest, the days were cool and cloudy and the nights cold with threat of frost. On August first the thermometer went to 35°. On the night of September twelfth there was a hard freeze. All over Saskatchewan and the neighboring provinces, Red Fife, the farmer's principal crop, had just begun to turn from green to yellow. In the kernels there was too much moisture to escape the ruin wrought by icy crystals.

In the trial plots there was equal desolation - in all except one plot labelled Marquis. Looking at those golden yellow stalks standing erect, the kernels hard and plump, Mackay saw the wheat he had long been looking for.

Equally good reports from the other stations were sent back to Ottawa."Marquis ripens from four to six days earlier than Fife and is less subject to stem rust." Ten years later 80 per cent of the wheat grown in the prairie provinces of Canada was Marquis. This was just in time, too, because in 1917 the mother country needed food as she never had before. After the war, a varietal census in the United States showed Marquis to be the leading spring wheat. It now makes up two-thirds of all the grain of this type harvested.

Such is the way new wheats are made from old.

Although wheat is of more immediate concern to the people of the United States, corn is indirectly of greater importance. Cattle, sheep, and swine are fattened on corn. In the form of meal and silage it makes up the bulk of the dairy ration. Without this cereal, eggs would cost more than they do. Cornstarch, corn oil, and corn syrup are used by cooks in daily recipes. Corn is the most valuable of our food resources.

A few years ago the editor of Wallace's Farmer reproduced on the cover of his magazine a photograph of the prize-winning ears of dent corn exhibited at the International Grain Show at Chicago. These splendid specimens - long,

broad, cylindrical ears, well capped at base and tip, the kernels deep, compact, and in straight rows - had been grown in Indiana, and represented the best from the whole country. Along with these handsome ears was printed a picture of the same number of other ears that had been grown in Iowa. No two ears were alike except that they were all poor. Of all the miserable, nubbiny, mouse-eaten, degenerate ears of corn that had ever been grown, these were certainly the worst - irregular rows, crooked cobs, bare tips, yellow, white, and red all mixed together. They were ears that most Iowa farmers would be ashamed to husk. Yet this editor of a farm paper had the effrontery, not only to show them to the readers outside of Iowa, but even to offer to let some one plant them for seed in comparison with the grand champion ears pictured alongside. Any one could see which looked the best. He wanted to know which yielded the most.

Keen-eyed Wallace had been telling the farmers of Iowa for a number of years that"looks mean nothing to a hog," but this was going too far. Hadn't they been taught that nothing but the very best ears should be saved for seed? Perhaps this young editor of an old established farm paper had lost his head entirely.

Whatever the grower of the prize-winning ears may have thought, he at least did not accept the offer to compare his good seed on a yield basis. Either, in his mind, the contest wasn't worth bothering with, or possibly there was more behind those scrawny ears than could be told by looking at them. There was. Confidentially, they were no culls from the corn crib. They were selected purposely to look worse than usual, but at best they were nothing that a corn grower would ever think of planting for seed unless he knew something of the story of crossed corn.

This story began about fifteen years before, when investigators at the Carnegie Institution on Long Island and the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station at New-Haven put paper bags on the ear shoots of corn before the silks appeared in order to prevent natural pollination. Bags were also put on the tassels to collect pollen. At the right time the plants' own fertilizing particles were dusted on the protected flowers. This operation, repeated year after year, resulted in the closest kind of inbreeding.