elve
days, discouraged, you plant more seed. Now two days later the first
carrots you sowed begin to appear. If you had known that it took carrots
from 12 to 18 days to germinate you'd not have made the mistake of
planting again so soon. I think of another reason," went on Peter
warming up to his subject. "Suppose you planted beet seed. You waited
ten days; nothing happened; you wait two more and still no seedling
appears; something is surely wrong and you plant over again."

"What could be wrong," asked Philip.

"The seed might be poor," replied Peter. "George has been testing seed,"
said Jay, "and he might tell us about it now, couldn't he, Chief? It
seems to come in here." The Chief nodded.

"I have been finding out whether certain seeds which I happen to have on
hand are worth planting or not. If any of you fellows have seed and wish
to find this out, you can easily enough. So you can be sure whether old
seed is worth planting. Now it happens that father had some of his last
year's corn and some from four years ago. So I took 100 seeds of each.
If you test small seed like lettuce, The Chief says 50 seeds will do.
These I put on blotters just as Pete did his. Of course, I kept them
separate. From last year's seed 90 seeds sprouted out of the 100, or
9/10 of them. And that equals 90 per cent. If all seed was 90 per cent.
good it would be all right to use, I think. Now when I looked at the
four-year-old seed, what do you think? Only five seeds had started. That
makes only 1/20, or 5 per cent. Of course, no one would care to use seed
where only 5 per cent. of the seed sprouted."

"Is there any real percentage of germination that seeds should have?"
Jack asked eagerly.

"Yes," replied The Chief, "although value as you see from George's
experiment is lost by age. The real standard germination value for corn
is 87 per cent., for beans 90, for turnips 90, for peas 93, etc. You
can see that the per cents. for these vegetables run high. So do not use
seeds when the per cent. has dropped too low.

"Has George found out the time when other seeds lose value?" asked
Peter. "I did not work this table out because I did not have the old
seed to work with," replied George, "but The Chief gave me a book to
look it up in. I have printed on our press the table. So you fellows may
each have a copy." George handed the sheets around the table.

It happened that The Chief had a little old printing press that he had
presented to the