With the self-binding harvester performing the work of twenty men, cutting and binding the grain, and arranging the bundles in windrows, it would seem that perfection in this art had been reached, but the tendency of the age is to do things on a constantly increasing scale, and so the latest developments in harvesters comprise a mammoth machine (Fig. 157) propelled across the grain fields by steam, and which by the same power cuts a swath from 26 to 28 feet wide, threshes it at once as it moves along, blows out the chaff, and puts the grain in bags at the rate of three bags per minute, each bag containing one hundred and fifteen pounds, and requiring two expert bag sewers to take the grain away from the spout, sew the bags, and dump them on the ground. Seventy-five acres a day is its task. A companion piece to this machine is illustrated in Fig. 158, which shows the same power utilized for planting. A powerful steam traction engine of fifty horse power hauls across the field a planting combination of sixteen ten-inch plows, four six-foot harrows and a seeding drill in the rear. Such great reaping machines only find useful application in the enormous wheat fields of California and the Pacific Coast States, where the dry climate permits the grain to ripen and dry sufficiently while standing in the field. Moreover, only the heads of the grain are cut, the straw being left standing. Some conception of the enormous scale upon which grain is raised in the Western States may be gotten from the dimensions of the farms. It is said that Dr. Glenn’s wheat farm comprises 45,000 acres; the Dalrymples’, in North Dakota, 70,000; and Mr. Mitchell, in the San Joaquin Valley, in California, has 90,000 acres. The Dalrymple farms in 1893 had 54,000 acres in wheat, and employed 283 self-binding reapers to harvest the crop. There is a single unbroken wheat field on the banks of the San Joaquin River, near the town of Clovis, in Madera County, California, which comprises 25,000 acres, or nearly forty square miles of wheat--a veritable sea of waving grain. The field is nearly square; each side is a little over six miles long. If its shape were changed to the width of one mile, the field would then be forty miles long. It has been said of the grain fields of the West, that the men and teams eat breakfast at one end of a furrow, take dinner in the middle of the row, and at night camp and sup at the end of the same row. With a field of such proportions it is not difficult to see how this may be true. The cultivation and garnering of crops from such vast areas can only be appreciated by comparisons. If it were one man’s work to plow such a field, even with a double gang plow, cutting a furrow twenty-four inches wide, he would travel 105,600 miles, which would be equivalent to going around the world four times. If he plowed twenty miles a day, it would take 5,280 days. To harrow would require as long, and to plant would