One practical Southern cotton planter has devoted much time and attention to the scientific study of the conditions on his own plantation and elsewhere as a contribution toward a judgment of the race problem. This is Alfred H. Stone, of Greenville, Miss., who has published half a dozen monographs, several of which are gathered into a volume, under the title "Studies in the American Race Problem" (1908). He is now engaged, under the auspices of the Carnegie Institution, on a study of the whole question. He has visited several Southern states and the West Indies, and brings to his inquiries the point of view of an employer of Negroes who wishes them well and sees the interest of his country in the improvement of negro labor. Perhaps his judgment is somewhat affected by the special conditions of Mississippi and of his own neighborhood, in which the Negroes are very numerous and perhaps more than usually disturbing. The results of his latest investigations will appear under the title "Race Relations in America"; and may be expected to be the most thorough contribution to the subject made by any writer. Among less formal publications are the negro periodicals, which are very numerous and include _Alexander's Magazine_ and a few other well-written and well-edited summaries of things of special interest to the race. The whole question has become so interesting that several of the great magazines have taken it up. The _World's Work_ devoted its number of June, 1907, almost wholly to the South; and the _American Magazine_ published in 1907-8 a series of articles by Ray Stannard Baker on the subject. In 1904 the _Outlook_ published a series of seven articles by Ernest H. Abbott based upon personal study. An interesting contribution is the so-called "Autobiography of a Southerner," by "Nicholas Worth," published in the _Atlantic Monthly_ in 1906. Whoever Nicholas Worth may be, there can be no doubt as to his Southern birth, training, and understanding, nor of his excellent style, sense of humor, and power to make clear the growth of race feeling in the South since the Civil War. All these and many other printed materials are at the service of the Northern as of the Southern investigator. Among their contradictory and controversial testimony may be discerned various cross currents of thought; and their statements of fact and the results of their researches form a body of material which may be analyzed as a basis for new deductions. But nobody can rely wholly on printed copy for knowledge of such complicated questions. Books cannot be cross-examined nor compelled to fill up gaps in their statements. The investigator of the South must learn the region and the people so as to take in his own impressions at first hand. Printed materials are the woof; but the warp of the fabric is the geography of the South, the distribution of soil, the character of the crops, the habits of the people, their thrift and unthrift, their own ideas as to their difficulties.