chromidial apparatus, or the so-called Nissl substance. It is a true metabolic pigment.

The genesis of the melanin in depression explains satisfactorily its occurrence in conditions of frank disease as well as in abnormal physiological conditions. It happens in disease because the majority of abnormal stimuli are essentially depressant. Melanin is also an almost invariable concomitant of old age. Recognizing the dual forms of senility, senility of depression and senility of excitation, the melanin is introduced by depression, which is an almost inevitable factor in the production of the combined state as it occurs in an organism under ordinary conditions. In the separate experimental production, pigment is the most concrete point of difference between the two forms of senility.

Of particular interest to anatomists is the exploding of the tradition that melanin pigment is a natural structural constituent of certain nerve cells. Such old terms as substantia nigra and locus cæruleus apparently have given this idea its greatest plausibility. Also the bulk of human anatomical material is from old or diseased individuals. Still no two investigators have ever agreed, either on its time of development, or on the places of its consistent location. As a matter of fact, the melanin may be entirely absent from an adult nervous system, and even if present in some cells of a part, it may be absent in others. Such pigment-free animals are however scarce, for few have escaped depression. Extending this negative deduction to man, the cells supposed to be pigmented are the most obviously homologous with those of lower animals naturally pigment free, and it would be a most unique anomaly if man's differentiation alone should endow him with the useless.

The lipochrome, or as it has been more commonly designated in doubt of its origin, the fat-holding or fat-combined pigment, has been the object of more active investigation and discussion in recent years. Its characteristic is its reaction to the fat stains, Sudan III. and scarlet red. The prevailing opinions have been either that it is some sort of a by-product

of cell metabolism, an "Abnutzung" or "wear-and-tear" pigment, as designated by Lubarsch, or that it is a more specific product of fat or fatty acid metabolism, the lipofuscin of Borst and Hueck.

The lipochrome turns out to be an exogenous pigment derived from the carotinoid pigments, namely, the carotin and xanthophyll of plants, which are ingested with the food. It might seem surprising that so direct a connection has escaped identification. It has not escaped a surmise, as the original transferrence of the word lipochrome from botany testifies, but the difficulty was that certain of the earlier microchemical tests for lipochrome in plants failed in their application to animal tissues. The development of the chemistry of the pigments is bringing a progressive identification between plants and animals. The identification started with the isolation in crystalline form of xanthophyll from the yolk of the hen's egg and of carotin from the corpus luteum by Willstätter and Escher.

The knowledge of the relation of these pigments to animal metabolism has been extended chiefly by Palmer and Eckles and later by Palmer alone. They have shown that the natural yellow pigment of the milk fat, body fat, corpus luteum and blood serum of the cow is identical with carotin, while xanthophyll predominantly, with some carotin, colors the egg yolk, body fat and blood serum of the hen. Further Palmer has demonstrated a remarkable species difference. Species with colored fat, such as the cow, horse and hen, carry the pigments in the blood serum; species with colorless fat, such as sheep, swine and goats, do not carry the pigments in the blood serum under the most favorable conditions.

Palmer is also carrying on some conclusive feeding experiments on chickens. Chickens deprived from birth of carotinoid pigments show absence of the yellow pigment in their skin, fat, egg yolk and blood serum. Given the pigments in their food, the color is restored. If any fowl, yellow from its natural food, be deprived of pigment, the color fades, though the process takes some months.

Such findings so aptly provided for an intracellular occurrence of lipochrome that the working hypothesis for the nerve cell was based on them. The point that first focused our attention on the probable carotinoid identity of nerve cell lipochrome was its absence in the rabbit and dog. The rabbit and dog have colorless fat. Man and cattle, known to show intracellular lipochrome, have colored fat.

Verification was first sought in the chicken. With the use for the most part of Palmer's chickens above described, two series were run, the one lacking carotinoid containing food from birth, the other carotinoid fed. The carotinoid feeding ranged from a one week's introduction in a bird hitherto carotinoid free to a lifelong natural pigment food in others. In one half of the chickens of both series the factor of depression by heat, phosphorus, morphine or a rice flour diet was introduced to cover the side of disease.

The results were uncomplicated. Both normal and depressed chickens on any carotinoid diet showed the presence of the characteristic yellow pigment in all nerve cells. The carotinoid-free chickens lacked such a pigment in demonstrable amount.

However, this physiological demonstration of the introduction of carotinoid pigment demands for completeness the support of microchemistry. The question at once arises if the pigment introduced in nervous and other body tissues is identical with the lipofuscin, "wearand-tear," fat-holding pigment described for the nerve and other somatic cells as specific. While it is true that the micro-chemistry of the lipochrome pigments is superficial, which is the reason that the analysis by that means has hitherto failed, yet it must be emphasized that it has become quite sufficient to demonstrate this identity. The application of this chemistry was more simple in our problem when following a means of providing or withdrawing the pigment at will. The yellow pigment introduced in nerve cells and the chicken skin, and the pigment of the carrot in frozen sections give the fat stains, the oxidation and decolorization by hydrogen peroxid and ferric

chlorid, the fat stains after oxidation, and the rapid solubilities in fat solvents in common with a supposed lipofuscin; while the most characteristic test for lipofuscin, the Nile blue stain of Hueck, equally applies to known lipochrome before and after its oxidation. This supposed metabolic pigment of the nerve cell is then identical with a true lipochrome.

Finally in corroboration of the species difference in the transferrence of the carotinoid pigment from plants, the cow as well as the chicken exhibits it in nerve cells, while swine with their colorless fat line up with the rabbit and dog in a complete absence. Man, who is best known to exhibit lipochrome, is also known to carry carotinoids in his blood serum, and has colored fat. The consistency is com

plete.

The lipochrome pigment of the nerve cell is therefore a plant carotinoid, derived from the food, but limited to such species as carry the carotinoids in the blood serum. The conception of it as 66 a wear-and-tear" pigment falls to the ground with its demonstration as an exogenous and fortuitous pigment. The melanin of the nerve cell is a true metabolic pigment, derived from nuclear materials and produced by chronic depression. Because of this, the conception of a "wear-and-tear" pigment is to be transferred to the melanin, as conditioned by agencies without the cell, with a restriction to the abnormal.

OFFICIAL FIELD CROP INSPECTION Now, when it has been forcibly brought out that the nation is vitally interested in farm results and that to get maximum production, some system of efficient supervision is essential it may not be out of place to call attention to a line of work in which official supervision would be beneficial and for various reasons quite essential, even under normal conditions. There is a phase of farm cropping, especially with cereals, in which the state is not only vitally interested but could become of great aid to growers, and to the consuming public. That line of work may perhaps be properly named official field crop inspection.

Great strides have been made, from the educational standpoint, in crop improvement during the past twenty-five years. It is apparent, however, to those who are closest to the work that improvement in cereal cropping is not nearly proportionate to the general gain in information as to possible cropping methods. There is much knowledge as to tillage, crop rotation, seed breeding, and much improvement in farm machinery and methods of crop handling through farm machinery; yet the processes which, from a scientific standpoint are necessary to high production of yield and quality are not in common practise and, when used, are so intermittently followed as to cause failure of crop improvement that should otherwise naturally follow.

If the above is true, it is worth the attention of those of us who are specialists in certain lines of agriculture to try to determine the reasons for such failure to follow best processes and to arrive at a remedy along the lines which may result in getting the process constructively carried on.

For example, much work is done in breeding seeds. The states and nation are at much expense to allow certain experts to study Men

delian methods of cross-breeding and other lines of work which result in the introduction of new varieties and kinds. Certain business men who are concerned with the results are not backward in saying that this introduction of varieties is often harmful rather than beneficial and those of us who are close enough to the field to note the results are perhaps willing to admit that many valuable varieties are so intermixed and so jumbled as to merit such disapproval.

It is safe to say that in cereal agriculture varieties are not kept separate, and are not handled in the same intelligent method as that which characterizes the best fruit and vegetable growing methods. Is there any reason why such should be the case?

Again, as I have pointed out in other addresses, though most agriculturists and many able farmers are convinced that a crop rotation is a necessary process for best seed and crop production in cereals, yet, there are few crop rotation series which are recognized for any particular region which are carried out with any consistency. There must be some general reason which accounts for such failures to apply the principles, methods and teachings which all of us and many able farmers believe in.

I do not wish here to enter into a discussion of crop rotation, soil tillage or purely sanitary matters of cropping, but will call attention to one phase which I think illustrates the way out, so that processes known to be necessary may be constructively continuous. I advocate a legal basis for bringing about stability and standardization of varieties in cereal cropping. I believe that there is good excuse for official supervision of seed production and distribution.

I am not, I believe, unduly optimistic when I affirm that under properly systematized seed standardization and sanitary cropping through means of proper handling of the soil and seed, any state or the nation might readily lift its annual average yield of wheat several bushels per acre per year. I think that a minimum increase of five to ten bushels per acre for proper systematic handling of the seed crop

might not be beyond reasonable expectation. Further, I believe this would be doubly assured were it no longer possible for a man to plant the same general crop two years in succession on the same land. For the land control proposition, we may not yet be ready, but certainly, for the seed control proposition we have reached the stage when it is folly to claim that further improvement can be made by simple process of education when almost all the processes of marketing and general farm procedure are so conducted as to offset any improvement that can be made by intermittent educational processes, however effectively administered. I need not only call attention to the fact that there are very few new varieties of cereals which remain in reasonably pure form past the third generation on the farm and in the market. Very few of the wheats in the leading districts survive a decade before they are replaced by some new creation which runs perhaps only a shorter more precarious existence.

Opposition to Progress.-Many of us are prone to descant on the initiative being left in the hands of the farmer and many in the business world or manufacturing side are pretty sure to decry any attempt to improve matters by the enactment of law. I am quite convinced that laws which are enacted but never put into operation are useless. I am also convinced that those which are enacted and put into operation and which remain in operation, such as the sanitary laws for the control of Texas fever, smallpox and compulsory disinfection after diphtheria, scarlet fever, etc., are laws which should have been enacted and which, because they are still in force, prove that there was a necessity for such enactment. I also believe that it will be understood that many laws are enacted which do not need to be enforced. They form the educational basis for stable processes. Many good laws are self-operative. Such laws remain on the books as a basis and guide for those officials whose business it is to advocate progressive advance. Such law, for instance, is the ordinary anti-expectoration law. It was easy to make fun of and to say that it

was unnecessary and that everything could be done by education, but who among us will contend that such criticism or opposition was well founded?

Nevertheless, when we strike the matter of farming processes and indicate that there should be sanitary laws affecting farm processes, officially supervised by state officers non-amenable to politics, etc., there are many who object and say that such laws are unnecessary and that we should "rely on educacational methods," indicating that too much supervision will bring about stagnation, etc. Then there are others who are sure to call such laws "sumptuary," etc., tending to prevent individual freedom of action and toward depression of business operations.

In years past we have gone so far in this laissez faire line of non-control of farming matters that any approach to supervision by the state of any farming work is sure to be resented by some line of business, even though it meets with favor in the eyes of those for whom it is intended to directly help. Thus, for example, there are few of us but can remember the strenuous efforts to resist fertilizer control lines of work, and the strong opposition to enactment of horticultural and entomological supervision for control of insect and fungus pests, and to the enactment of simple seed inspection laws. Even now, in the work of plant disease control, it is apparent that there are yet those who insist that the state should keep out; that there should be no supervisory laws affecting control work. When, for example, but lately it was proposed that the states and nation should attempt control of wheat rust through barberry eradication, there were not a few who should know most as to the reasons for the necessity of such eradication, who spoke out freely and feeling in the advocacy of a "campaign of education" and as though we had not had that campaign for nigh on to two centuries. And now, if one should but propose compulsory seed treatment for cereals for prevention of smut and control of scab and similar cereal diseases, or a law simply to prevent continuous cropping of the land so that there might

not be a continuous accumulation of such diseases in the soil and seed of special crops, there would be many so-called "educated men " who would throw up their hands in feigned horror. Yet enactment of such soil seed laws would be but a natural consequence following upon years of investigation and established knowledge relative to what should be done in order to control such cereal diseases. In other words, it would be but a natural step toward carrying out present knowledge of cereal control through sanitary methods so that the work done may not be continually and perpetually a loss through the carelessness of ordinary marketing and farming processes.

I discuss this phase of the sanitary question as to soil and seed only to introduce the idea of the necessity that the states attempt by law to standardize seed quality through proper methods of seed cropping and seed control.

I propose the thought that many of our socalled "educational campaigns" need a basis of equitable law. One can not expect sanitary or proper planning to be carried out merely on the suggestion of a professor from the agricultural college or of an extension worker if the carrying out of the processes must be placed eternally upon the utopian basis that the man who does the work may hope for some results but whether he does or does not get them he should and is expected to do it so that his neighbor may also prosper. Merely to recite to him that the public should have the benefit of the better crop that he will raise loses force after a time except it be backed by an emergency such as has come about under war conditions. It is too great a strain on the word "loyalty" to ask it, unless asked of all. In fact, the work will not be done with sufficient unanimity to give worth while results except it be done by all continuously, year by year. The proper basis for sanitation on the farm as to crops is not different from in the home, factory and school. It should rest on equitable law, educationally and equitably administered. I believe that the first step in cereal crop improvement rests in a further extension of