An Antidote For Wasp Stings.—It not infrequently happens that persons biting unguardedly into fruit in which a wasp is concealed receive stings in the mouth or throat. Such stings may be exceedingly dangerous and even fatal since the affected tissues swell rapidly and this is liable to cause difficulty in swallowing and breathing. An effective antidote is employed in Switzerland. The sting is rubbed vigorously with garlic, or, if it is too deep in the throat for this treatment, a few drops of the juice from bruised garlic are swallowed. If garlic is not to be obtained onion may take its place, but is a less active agent. The efficacy of this simple remedy was verified by a Swiss specialist, who found it important enough to be presented at a session of the Vaudois Society of Medicine.
Increasing the Fertility of the Land.
PROF. F. J. ALWAY, DIVISION OF SOILS, UNIVERSITY FARM, ST. PAUL.
I have been asked to speak on "Increasing the Fertility of the Land." To speak on such a subject is sometimes a rather delicate matter because some people consider they have a soil so good that you can't increase its fertility. With some of the prairie soils, when they were first plowed up that wouldn't have been so very far amiss. Take those black prairie soils with the grayish yellow clay subsoil, with an abundance of lime in it, which you find in a large part of the state, including a large part of Hennepin County, and you have as good a soil as you may expect to find anywhere on the earth's surface. But you can't keep a soil up to its full limit of fertility, no matter how good it is, unless you frequently treat it with something.
Prof. F. J. Alway.
When a soil is well supplied with lime there are three things that are liable to be deficient. If it is not well supplied with lime there may be four, but the bulk of your soils are good enough so far as lime is concerned. Those three are potash, which is abundant and will be abundant 100 years from now, phosphoric acid, or phosphorus, with which our soils are fairly well supplied, and nitrogen, which comes from the vegetable matter. In nitrogen our prairie soils are remarkably rich when first plowed up. The phosphoric acid and the potash you can not lose unless they are taken away in the form of crops, but the nitrogen may be lost without even taking off crops. All you have to do is to cultivate your soil, when part of the nitrogen becomes soluble in water and is carried down by the rain into the water-table unless you have plants growing with roots to take it up; a large part escapes into the air. So when your black prairie soil has been under cultivation for twenty years, as an orchard, usually from one-half to one-third of the original nitrogen has escaped, most of it into the air, only the smaller part being carried off in the crops. That is the one thing that orchardists and horticulturists have to concern themselves about first of all, so far as soil fertility is concerned.
I see that the first of the questions for me to answer deals with that. "What crop do you consider the best green manure?" There are two kinds of green manures. One is represented by rye. Rye takes up the nitrogen that is in the soil, and when it dies leaves behind what it took out of the soil; the next crop can get this. By plowing under the rye crop you do not increase the amount of nitrogen, the most important element of fertility in the soil.