cultivated plant of the world at the present time. It produces the largest total amount of food and lends itself so easily to the use of machinery that it is grown cheaply on large areas.

A history of the development and use of this premier cereal would tell much about the progress of the white race. The nearest relative of wheat grows wild in Palestine. There the climate is comparatively mild. It is somewhat of a mystery how this plant has been made to endure the cold of Russian steppes, the dampness of English fogs, and the scorching of Kansas droughts.

One of the notable figures at the Kansas State Agricultural College, where I was a student, was Professor Herbert Roberts. He was often seen with a large leather bag, hung from a strap over his shoulder, full of small bottles of wheat. These wheats he had collected from all parts of the world - from Turkey and Russia principally, because from these countries had come the varieties best adapted to Kansas conditions and those that made the finest bread. These samples of wheat were planted in small plots, hundreds of them. When they grew to maturity, some were found to be uniform in type, but many were badly mixed. Following the success of Nilsson in Sweden, Vilmorin in France, and Hays in Minnesota, Roberts selected individual heads and increased the seed from them until a sufficient amount was obtained to judge their good and poor qualities when grown in comparison. Each lot was planted in a small square. The test field looked much like a gigantic checkerboard; light-colored, beardless wheats alternated with bearded wheats with dark chaff. Year after year these trial lots of wheat were grown and the poorest discarded, although it was almost a hopeless task to try to pick the best when so many yielded about the same.

In the spring of the year, when the wheat was first pushing up to head, Professor Roberts usually came late to class, his mind on those plots of wheat, trying to decide which were the best and whether any of them were really any better than the wheat the farmers were already growing.

One good wheat year followed another, but finally a winter came when the Kansas wheat crop did not look so promising. There was little snow, and the cold came early. The wind blew the soil away from the roots. In the spring the worst fears of the farmers were realized. Field after field showed only a sprinkling of green plants, not enough to pay for the harvest.

At Manhattan everything looked discouraging. Instead of the usual checkerboard, only here and there appeared anything green. The farm foreman wanted to plow up the whole field, for already the weeds were starting to grow where there was no wheat. But in one spot in the field Roberts saw a square that was all green. There could be no weeds in that patch because there were no missing plants. Looking at the label, he knew that this plot had come from a single plant, number P 762. The records showed that P 762 was a head selection from a mixed lot of wheat from Crimea. Perhaps the winters in that part of Russia were as severe as in Kansas, and maybe the winds blew just as hard. Anyway, whatever constituted winter-hardness, this wheat had it.

The field was left unplowed. The weeds grew in the rest of the field. The students scoffed:"If my father couldn't grow better crops than that, he couldn't afford to send me to this college." But the plants in the one little patch stood proudly erect as if they knew some one were watching them.

In due time several quarts of plump, red kernels were harvested. Would they make good bread? There was all too little seed for sowing, so none could be spared for baking. But perhaps another year . . . The following year was also trying for Kansas wheat, but number P 762 again lived through the winter and yielded well, and this time there was enough grain to send a small portion over to the milling and baking department. Soon the official report came back:"P 762 shows a distinctly higher protein content both in the wheat and in the flour, a higher percentage of flour than Kharkof but somewhat less than Turkey, a loaf expansion practically equal to Kharkof and slightly greater than Turkey, color of loaf equal to or greater than either of the standard varieties, and texture of loaf equal or superior to either of the other varieties."

In 1914, P 762 was given the name Kanred and distributed to farmers in the hard winter wheat sections for trial. Careful tests on the various sub-stations and on cooperative farms had shown that Kanred ripened earlier, was freer from stem rust, and markedly more winter hardy than the wheats commonly grown. In sixty-six tests Kanred yielded an average of 3.7 bushels more per acre than Turkey, the wheat most generally grown.

Ten years after it was first introduced, Kanred was grown in twenty states, on four million acres, and comprised 21 per cent of the hard, red winter wheat grown in the United States - all from a single kernel planted in 1905 in the wheat nursery of the Kansas Agricultural Experiment Station.

During those same years that the unnamed, fall-sown Kanred wheat was meeting its most severe test in winter's cold, another unknown grain was being equally tried, farther north, by shortened season and early fall frosts. To get the beginning of this story it is necessary to go back to the time of the pioneers on the plains of western Canada.

The Indians looked on in amazement while the first white settlers, sent by the Hudson's Bay Company, dug up the prairie sod with hand hoes and planted wheat and barley, potatoes and peas. Their surprise turned to contempt when the wheat "choked with weeds and failed to ripen."In derision they called the colonists "jardiniers." For two years in succession wheat failed to make a crop, and no one would have predicted at that time that those northern plains were to become one of the most important wheat-producing areas in the world.