In its root growth it is probably the greatest wonder among plants. While it usually grows no higher than four or five feet (although it has been known to reach more than ten feet; an unirrigated stalk is on exhibition at the office of the Kansas Board of Agriculture, measuring nearly seven feet) and its normal height is about three feet, its roots go down ten, twenty, or more feet, and one case in Nevada is reported by Charles W. Irish, chief of Irrigation Inquiry United States Department of Agriculture, where the roots were found penetrating through crevices in the roof of a tunnel one hundred and twenty-nine feet below the surface of an alfalfa field. Prof. W. P. Headden of Colorado found roots nine feet long from alfalfa only nine months old, and another reports roots seventeen inches long of but four weeks’ growth, the plants being but six inches high. It usually has a slender taproot, with many branches tending downward, yet with considerable lateral growth. As the taproot is piercing the earth it is also sending out new fibrous roots, while the upper ones, decaying, are leaving humus and providing innumerable openings for air, the rains, and fertilizing elements from the surface soil. The mechanical effect of this root-growth and decay in the soil constitutes one of the greatest virtues of the plant, and by its roots alfalfa becomes, self-acting, by far the most efficient, deep reaching subsoiler and renovator known to agriculture. VARIETIES AND PECULIARITIES There are several other varieties of alfalfa besides _Medicago sativa_, the most common being the _Intermediate Lucerne_ or _Medicago media_, the Yellow Lucerne or _Medicago foliata_ and Turkestan alfalfa or _Medicago sativa Turkestanica_. None of these have such unqualified value as the ordinary alfalfa; in fact the first two are properly regarded as weeds when found with _Medicago sativa_. In 1898 when there had been reported many failures in the alfalfa districts of the extreme North and the extreme Southwest, the United States Department of Agriculture sent Prof. N. E. Hansen of South Dakota to Russia, especially the cold, arid and semi-arid portions of northern Turkestan, to discover if possible a more hardy strain of alfalfa than that grown in America. He brought back from there several hundred bushels of seed which was distributed to government stations and individual experimenters in forty-seven states and territories. The reports of its behavior varied greatly, some growers being enthusiastically in its favor, while most reported results below or not above the average from other sorts, and some practically a failure. It would appear from the consensus of opinion at this time that the Turkestan alfalfa has not demonstrated in America any such superiority as to justify its general adoption, even in the dry and warm regions of the Southwest, in our colder states, or in Canada. [Illustration: =An Eight-year-old Alfalfa Plant=