The Daily Alaska empire., 1929-12-23
Sub-Arctic Wheat.
(NeW York Times.)

In the Johns Hopkins University Magazine is an account of what Charles E. Saunders has done to push back the frozen circle of the Arctic many miles" and extend the wheat fields toward the Pole. This conquest has been achieved after patient experiments begun by the father and carried on by the sons in search of wheat that would have the desirable qualities for milling and baking pur- poses and yet would ripen early enough to escape destruction by the frosts.
 In 1903 MT Saunders began to reselect the cross bred varieties which his father assisted by older son in his vacations, had developed a decade be- fore This involved watching the development of each of hundreds of plants;
 noting the height to which it attained Gan
 important item in the cutting), the serngth
 of the straw, the length of time necessary
 for maturing, the size and weight of the
 grains, so essential in the yield per acre.
 the tenacity with which the seeds clung to
 the parent stem (again of utmost import
 ance, since wheat which shed its grains on
 the ground before they were fully ripe, or
 during the cutting, meant enormous
 monetary loss to the farmers), and, finally,
 when all these numerous qualifications had
 been combined in the same plant testing
 the grains obtained to see if they made
 white bread of the proper consistency and
 of standard weight for the amount of flour
 used.
 He ingeniousy supsUlJuted simple tests chewing the grains and determining their gluten content and the color and consistency of the bread they would produce and thus shortened by years the period of the search for the short rustless wheat of desired qualities. In the end he found it. The Marquis wheat emerged from the hundreds of strains but only by aid of the patient scholar He is described poetic dreamer" yet in one year 20000000 acres in Canada and the United States were sown in Marquis wheat At the price at which the estimated product sold in that year the total crop valued at $20o00O0OO0 The narrow strip of 'habtabe Canada" stretching the continent has become several hundred miles broader" the result of the studies made by a dreamer" on an experimental farm.
 The poetic legend of St. Leonor which Sidney Laner quoted in his unfinished lecture at Johns Hopkins University many years ago "The Rela- tion of Poetry and Science" could not have been more practically verified in real life The legend told of the stags that came harnessed out of the forest and drew the blows of St. Leonor and his disciples till the stubborn soil was reclaimed and made a wheat field which in turn became the father of thousand other wheat fields and of a thousand other homes, with all the amenities and sweetnesses which are implied in that ravshng word" The moral of the story was that if a man went forth sure of his mission in service to his fellowmen and adhered to it. the powers of nature would come out of the recesses of the universe as the Stags from the wood, and offer themselves as draught animals to the blow. The little field Tn which MT. Saunders made his experiments has become the parent of thousands of other fields TIT toward the Arctic where the Summers are short and the Winters come early and finger late