Knowledge that Transforms

on Agriculture and Colonization in Span? ish America,1 Professor Karl Kaerger has collected about fifty reports which he had sent in the years 1895 to 1900 to the Imperial German Foreign Office in his capacity as agricultural expert at the legations in Buenos Ayres and Mexico. In view of the importance which the Argentine republic has gained as a competitor of the United States on the world's wheat market in the last decade, an attempt will be made to discuss the content of those reports referring to wheat culture in Argentine,2 and with the purpose of attracting attention to this admi? rable piece of work of Kaerger, the clearness and thoroughness of which deserve the warmest recommendation. Kaerger's work begins with an estimate of the acreage which in Argentine might with advantage be devoted to the cultivation of wheat. He does not agree with Alois E. Fliess, who in his report, written for the Argentine government (La Produccion Agricola y Ganadera de la Repitblica Argentina en el ano i8gp Buenos Aires, 1893), estimates it as high as 240,000,000 acres,3 but believes it to be 150,000,000 acres, a figure which he reduces in a report written after a longer sojourn in

IN I844 the manager of the Paris-Orleans Railway, Francois Bartholony, gave admirable expression to the principles that should animate directors of such undertakings: "To all those who serve our company and contribute to its prosperity, it behooves us to give an interest in that prosperity; that is to say, we should stimulate their zeal, reward their exertions, raise them in their own esteem and in that of the public in a word, attract to us capacity. By every such measure we shall reap direct and indirect advantage. Moreover, the men who spend their lives in our service ought never to find themselves within sight of destitution. If the retired officials of a great administration are allowed to come down too low in the social scale, its dignity is bound to suffer."