Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: cheapening qualities and are highly undesirable in tobacco used in the manufacture of the modern cigarette. In a word, the chemistry of soil, fertilizer and plant has become an important industrial science, nearly an exact science, and this science has made it plain that, whereas fertilization is highly desirable for tobacco raised for other manufacturing purposes where bulk rather than high quality counts, yet fertilization in any marked degree means deterioration for the finer grades—the cigarette grades—of the plant. It is, therefore, clear that the question of the quality of tobacco is chiefly dependent upon soil, and nature has so planned that the cream of our tobacco soil, the combination of sand and clay of just the right proportion, is found mainly in Virginia and North Carolina in what are termed the "old belt" and "new belt." On these "bright" tobacco lands grows the finest grade, the highest priced tobacco— the aristocracy of tobaccodom—and it is this aristocrat of all tobacco that is utilized in all of our domestic cigarettes. So much for the important question of soil. It is not, however, in the matter of the necessary soil alone that the superiority of cigarette tobacco is shown. That is again made evident when we come to consider the selection of seed, the growing of the plants and their preparation for transplanting. The seeds of cigarette tobacco are among the miracles of nature. One tablespoonful will produce plants enough to cover ten acres of ground. Cen- Se"fs W™ turies of painstaking culture and MoreThan crossing have been devoted to . % ,j their development. If sold, they m Cold are worth many times their weight in gold; but more often than not they are not offered for sale; they are saved from the perfect plants in the fields and kep...