was chosen instead of his favorite wild places. The good men to whom Borrow's letters were addressed were once more displeased with their tone. No doubt it was the indiscriminate mixture of pious and ungodly sentiments which shocked them. Borrow's confession of superstitiousness "when read aloud in a large committee" sounded very odd, don't you know, while the tone of his letter "savoured a little of the praise of a personage called number one. Moreover, Borrow had said that during his perilous journey (in which nothing happened), "his usual wonderful good fortune" had accompanied him. "This," says the Bible Secretary, "is a mode of speaking to which we are not well accustomed-it savours, some of our friends would say, a little of the profane.' In reply Borrow humbly expressed regret that he had thus erred and promised to mend, saying that he had already prayed for assistance to do so. No more expressions "savouring of pagan times" would be used; but it is hard for the leopard to change his spots and he relapsed into his epistolary sins of omission and commission to the end.

The small store of Testaments which remained was now seized and the malicious act reported thus: "It was Sunday when the seizure was made, and I happened to be reading the Liturgy." Indeed, one of the constables, being of an observant turn of mind, remarked on the "different manner in which the Protestants and Catholics keep the Sabbath, the former being in their homes reading good books (one of them being a personage called number one) and the latter abroad in the bullring, seeing the wild bulls tearing out the gory bowels of the poor horses." After giving vent to these pious sentiments, we may imagine the constable hurrying away so as to be in time for his favorite spectacle.

Although Borrow's usefulness in Spain had now come to an end, he was anxious to get in a few last blows for the cause. By means of the utmost secrecy he was still able to give "the blessed books considerable circulation."

But the ruffians who beset him everywhere now laid hand upon him for the last time, and "he was led or rather dragged to jail." His sojourn in the prison of Seville was not prolonged, more is the pity, as he might well have used his leisure time in making a careful and complete record of the extensive rogue's vocabulary for which that jail has always been famous, thus carrying out an undertaking for which he was qualified by his tastes and gifts. After his release he hurried to Madrid to demand redress of the Spanish Government for the various outrages he had been subjected to during his final efforts.

The door being now closed in Spain to any further activities of the British and Foreign Bible Society, its agent was definitely recalled. We would like to believe Borrow's own statement in spite of his many misrepresentations of the truth, that the years of his sojourn in the Spanish Peninsula were among the happiest of his life. Indeed, it would but seem reasonable to expect that after so many years of wandering through Spain he should have carried away some faithful mental images as well as a few trustworthy opinions to the effect that, although the Spanish Government has been very generally bad, the people have something in them that is commendable or good; or that the Church with all her shortcomings is not wholly bloody, bigoted, satanic and the rest, since it was at least suited to the temper of the Spanish people. No such objective attitude could have been expected from Borrow's peculiar temperament. On his return to England, filled with bitter feelings against Spain, he stated that "the Spaniard has no conception that other springs of action exist than interest or villainy"; that among the people of the Peninsula he had met " only three who were not scoundrels, thieves or assassins." And a few years later he was asked to review Richard Ford's Handbook on Spain, a duty he ought to have undertaken cheerfully inasmuch as Ford had in his usual kindly spirit reviewed The Bible in Spain, stinting neither praise of the book nor

admiration of its author. Borrow, on the other hand, sat down in a temper and without mentioning the work of Ford at all penned a strangely unreasonable arraignment of the Spanish Peninsula and of every inhabitant, all of which could certainly not have been calculated to make popular a book purporting to be a guide through that country. Was he filled with jealousy of Ford's splendid work? At all events, his attitude showed a fanatical and small spirit. The article was submitted to Lockhardt, the editor of the Quarterly Review, who expressed a wish to add a few extracts from the Handbook so as to give some idea of what the review pretended to be reviewing. This Borrow curtly refused to allow, as it was tampering with his paper, and it was therefore rejected. If he had had any sense of proportion or sweet reasonableness in his nature he would have appreciated a certain old Spanish legend. This tells us that once upon a time in the good old days a certain King of Spain was walking in his gardens and behold,— Santiago, Patron Saint of Spain, suddenly stood before him. Now the countenance of the King seemed troubled, and the Saint, knowing that he had at heart the good of the Spanish people, asked him to express the wishes dearest to him, and that, if possible, they would be granted. "Bestow on my country," said the King, "an admirable climate." "Granted," said the Saint, "what next?" "May there ever be abundant harvests of the earth's best products." "So be it," replied Santiago. "May my country ever boast valiant sons and winsome daughters." "That, too, I grant," was the answer. "Let Spain always be favored with an excellent government." "Never," cried Santiago, "that is impossible; for if I were to grant you a regime worthy of this blessed land, even the angels would abandon heaven to make their abode in Spain."

AN ACCOUNT OF THE METHODS OF WORK OF THE AGRICULTURAL INSTITUTIONS

IN CALIFORNIA*

THOMAS FORSYTH HUNT

Last spring a letter was received from President Thompson which read in part as follows:

"The Executive Committee last week unanimously decided to request you to go on the general programme on the following theme, or such statement of it as you might prefer, namely, The Plan of Agricultural Operations in California. The committee seemed to think it would be very desirable to have some account of the work at Fresno, Riverside and elsewhere and to set out in a paper the method of procedure," etc.

To this invitation the following reply was sent:

"Your letter of May 3-has been received. I do not feel at liberty to decline your invitation although I have much hesitation in accepting it for the obvious reason that it puts me in the position of discussing and even defending our own work before our guests. However, if you are willing to accept the responsibility for the invitation and for the wording of the title, I will comply with the request."

* An address delivered before the Association of American Agricultural Colleges and Experiment Stations, held at Berkeley, California, August 11-13, 1915.

The more I have analyzed the situation the more I must confess I am puzzled concerning the reason for this request. Even if it were possible to demonstrate that the method of procedure is a successful one, it does not follow that such procedure would succeed elsewhere or if it could be made to succeed would be desirable. We believe it is a good method or we would not follow it, but it may as well be confessed that I have applied all those yard-sticks by the means of which success ordinarily is measured and find that each projects beyond the size of the cloth, whether measured lengthwise or sidewise, except possibly in the case of the stick of popular appreciation. However, the California spirit of appreciation and helpfulness, known to Easterners as the habit of "boasting and boosting" makes this stick a variable one.

California has an area equal to the nine North Atlantic States-the six New England States, plus New York, Pennsylvania and New Jersey. These nine North Atlantic States have ten agricultural experiment stations, ten separate organizations and twenty-five millions of people. California has one organization and two and one-half millions of people. It has all the agricultural problems of the North Atlantic States and in addition has problems of which the man who always has lived in a humid climate never has dreamed. Further, most of the agricultural investigators of the world have lived and continue to live in humid climates and have studied the problems of humid climates. The best that can be said for the California organization is, that it has made, or more correctly is endeavoring to make, a virtue out of a necessity. Instead of saying the problem is hopeless because of its size and complexity, the organization has said, we will make a better college of agriculture because of the size and complexity of the problems involved.

The physical aspect of the situation may be illustrated by referring to the fact that we have a farm adviser in Humboldt County and a substation in Imperial Valley.