THE BEGINNINGS OF COMMERCIAL COÖPERATION The formative efforts of the decade thus noted have continued to this day and have developed new policies and new lines of science and practice as a progressive industry has shown need of them, and will continue such development to extensions and achievements which we cannot foresee. Such efforts were however chiefly in the cultural phases of the industry. About 1885 there arose to common view the imperative need of beginning correspondingly strenuous and systematic efforts on the commercial side. It then began to become clear that such great production of fruits as natural conditions favored and human enterprise and industry were capable to attain, could only result in financial frustration unless the producers' ideal of the greatest volume of production with reasonable profit, could be substituted for the traders' ideal of the greatest profit from the least volume of production. The producers' plan was to use all suitable land and supply a world of consumers; the traders' plan was to sell fruit at such high prices as but few people could pay so that his margin would be greatest and his risk and investment least. There is, of coarse, an irrepressible economic conflict between these plans and the views and purposes which underlie them. It was in 1885 that the man who was then selling most California fruits in Chicago declared that "New York could take so little that it could be easily sent on by express from Chicago." It was poor prophecy, for in 1917 the carloads both of deciduous fruits and oranges which found a terminal in Chicago comprised only about one-sixth of the total shipments, five-sixths going east of Chicago. But the declaration of the traders' conception of the opportunity for distant shipment in 1885 shows how futile would have been the effort to build up large production for distant shipment if growers had not discerned their commercial needs and taken steps to secure them for themselves. It required many faltering steps to make any headway at all and many more to get into a gait-if indeed the stride is even yet fully acquired; but it was in 1885 that the first serious effort was made to attain self-marketing by growers, which the pioneers had declared fifteen years earlier would be the only solution for producers' problems. In October, 1885, The Orange Growers' Protective Union was organized in Los Angeles and in November following the California Fruit Union was organized in San Francisco. Neither of these organizations lived long nor did much but they both begat offspring to the end that after about thirty years of evolution and revolution in organization, not less than 75 per cent of our fresh and cured fruits are sold and distributed coöperatively by the growers thereof and the fruit markets of the country made safe for democracy. In this thirty years' war California has not only rendered sure her own future in large production but has set the pace for similar movements in all the large fruit regions of the United States. This attainment is the culmination of more than sixty years of broad conceptions, of clear foresight, of sustained and resolute effort and of investment of everything which makes for cultural and commercial success. Some measure of the attainment can be found in the facts that the fruit industries of California cover not less than onefourth of the total value of the fruit industries of the United States, and that California's output of all fruits and fruit products is much larger than that of any other single state. CALIFORNIA'S RECIPROCATION In considering the development of California's fruit industries in their state relations it must be freely admitted that California is herself largely the product of other states through the gifts of citizenship and capital. Other states were charmed by her romantic youth; they encouraged her unique development and admired her productive maturity, and they have during the whole course of her life richly endowed her with the best they had themselves achieved in the arts of industry and civilization thus enabling her to stand forth in the eyes of the world as the commonwealth of most cosmopolitan Americanism. In the development of her fruit industries, California has also had notable help from the other states through the placing of her products under the protective tariff which offset remoteness and higher cost of transportation and higher wages than were paid in the Mediterranean countries which were her chief competitors. The handicap which impended through the free trade legislation of 1913 was averted by the world war; and the revenue needs of the country after the war may render indulgence in free trade policies impracticable for a long time to come. It should not be forgotten, however, that California's development in fruit production has always owed much to the patriotic principle of American products for Americans. But in acknowledging California's great debt to national help in population, capitalization and legislation, it is not amiss to remind our benefactors that California has, inadvertently at least, achieved things which have been helpful to them in their different fields of activity and advancement. Of those pertinent to this discussion which have distinct bearing upon the fruit development of the whole country, a few may be cited. 1. The relation of tillage to thrift and productiveness of fruit trees and vines: California demonstrated that clean garden-like culture of large fruit areas is superior to cow-pasture conditions; and she first applied on a large scale the principle that adequate tillage is effective for moisture conservation both in operations by rainfall and by irrigation. To these early conceptions California has recently added the widest demonstration that cover-cropping with tillage includes restoration of soil fertility in the act of securing the highest duty of water. 2. The relation of form to efficiency of plant performance: California has devised methods and styles of tree and vine pruning and has modified older systems from other parts of the world with such success that such a thing as "California style" is recognized horticulturally and is being accepted as a model for imitation in more recently developed fruit regions in all parts of the world. 3. The relation of plant protection to success in commercial production: California has devised original methods and demonstrated the value of new materials in insect warfare which other fruit growing countries have accepted as important improvements. In addition to her initiative in legislation to control and exclude pests which has previously been cited, California first applied high pressure spraying and invented devices to secure it; she first publicly announced through an experiment station bulletin investigations which made legal control of insecticide manufacture and sale imperative, though a few other states beat her to actual enactment; she first demonstrated the efficiency of lime sulphide in killing armored scales on dormant deciduous trees which is now universally employed for that purpose; she discovered the availability of hydrocyanic gas for insect killing on tented evergreen trees and saved her citrus industry by systematic and timely invention which rendered the use of this treatment practicable and profitable; she first made great and striking demonstration of success in bringing from abroad the natural enemy of an injurious insect which had escaped its sphere of influence and effectively checked its running amuck throughout our horticultural flora, and also made world search for beneficial insects and introduction of them a sustained state policy. In a very different phase of fruit protection, California was first to demonstrate the feasibility of frost prevention by direct heating of the atmosphere. 4. The relation of new varieties to commercial fruit production: Californians have originated new varieties of fruits which in the case of peaches, plums, almonds, and walnuts constitute the larger part of our commercial product of these fruits; they have built up their immense citrus fruit production with varieties of especial suitability which were not commercially important elsewhere. All these fruits, of California birth and adoption, have now a place in the world pomologies with credit to this state and are becoming important abroad in all regions which have natural conditions resembling our own. In addition to his notable contributions to this attainment, the unique conceptions and original methods of Luther Burbank have given California leadership in plant breeding in the public mind and have stimulated public interest in plant improvement which otherwise might not have been attained in a century. But in fruit growing California does not need new varieties so much as better varieties of types already demonstrated to be supremely serviceable and acceptable. In this direction the demonstration of rigid test and acute selection as a basis of propagation made in California by Mr. Shamel, is destined to become a moving horticultural force throughout the world. 5. The relation of California enterprises and methods to fruit preservation. California is the leading state in the Union in the output of canned and dried fruits, and California styles of these products and methods of producing them are models in other parts of the world which have conditions favoring their use. The California pioneer policy of planting trees with fruit preservation as a primary object-not looking upon preservative processes as merely means for saving fruits from waste-was new to America though it was a prevailing practice in some parts of Europe. Upon it rests largely the development of our great canning and drying industries. The California drying tray is an original invention of about fifty years ago, which by its cleanliness, ease of handling and economy of space, immediately relieved our producers from most of the cost and all of the dirt of the drying floors used from time immemorial throughout the Mediterranean region. The use of sulphur for preserving natural color in sun-dried fruit is an ennobling of the older art of using sulphur as a bleaching agent, this benign use of sulphur being original in this state and now widely used in other parts of the world which have sun heat and dry air like ours. The California fruit box so-called, but which was probably first used in shipping Oregon apples to San Francisco, has put a lighted stick of dynamite under the old bushel basket and barrel which promises shortly to destroy them as fruit carriers. California raisin machinery has invaded historic Malaga. California packing houses for all kinds of fruit embody original work in plan, policy and appliances, and all the wonderful results attained in careful handling of fruit in the orchard, on the road, in the packing house and in the cars and in realizing the advantage of pre-cooling, are based upon the original work of Mr. Powell and his associates in California. The principles which they demonstrated here are applicable everywhere. THE AVENUES TO ATTAINMENT As one looks backward from the heights of 1917, when the California fruit industries made an output which commanded a value of two hundred million dollars at selling points, the conclusion seems warranted that the avenues to such attainment have in the past opened along the lines of Conception, Colonization, and Coöperation, and that while conception must perhaps be regarded as adequate and complete, future development through colonization of California's waiting fruit lands and through the pooling of all essential efforts in coöperative enterprise may disclose opportunities and record achievements in the future which are beyond the sight of this generation. THE TREND OF RESEARCH IN EVOLUTION AND THE UTILIZATION OF ITS CONCEPTS D. T. MACDOUGAL Director of the Department of Botanical Research, Carnegie Institution of Washington The main features of the developmental history of life on the earth's surface are commonplaces. That the pattern of living things in any age has included a wide variety of plants and animals, which have differed from those of the previous geological epoch and have been succeeded by others progressively divergent from the earlier forms, is universally accepted as part of our general knowledge. The idea that these successive forms of life might be in an evolutionary procession found place in the scholastic mind long before it could be based on adeaquate facts or confirmed by orderly knowledge. It was no more than a dim concept in Aristotle's time, and could only remain as a fascinating hypothesis, quite at variance with all accepted ideas, until modern science applied analytical methods and refined measurements to the phenomena of life. When this was done, the conclusions which might be drawn from the disclosed facts of relationship, heredity and adjustments with environmental agencies were irresistible in the establishment of evolutionary procedure, as a plan or mode of action by which the plants and animals as we know them have been derived from ancestral forms from which they differ in form and in manifold qualities and capacities. The adequacy of the conception, both in its wide inclusion and in the breadth of its interpretations, has caused it to be adopted as a |