Conserving Our Harvests.

THREE and a half centuries ago Francis Bacon said "I take all knowledge to be my -sphere." Though competent scholars state that Bacon was far from having full knowledge of the science of his day, his aspiration was not ridiculous or even particularly remarkable in his time, and had he given to science half the time he devoted to statecraft he might well have mastered all the science that was then known. An Italian contemporary of Bacon, Giambattista delta Porta, made studies which are still mentioned in histories of optics, included in his extensive "Magia Naturalis," a chapter on producing new plantsprobably the first organized article on plant breeding-wrote a work on plant signatures and in modern