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Speaking of gambusia (TIME, May 1 under Italy) did you know that this useful little minnow was first imported into Greece from Rome some years ago by the American Farm School on the outskirts of Salonica, to combat malaria. deadly scourge of Macedonia and all the Near East? The undrained swamps and ubiquitous containers for conserving the scant rainfall create breeding places for the anopheles mosquito which is the disease carrier. The School now propagates gambusia and each year plants large numbers of them where the)7 will do the most good by eating the larvae of the mosquito. Thanks to their energetic measures, malaria has practically been stamped out in the environs of the School, and propaganda spread by graduates scattered over the country has brought like relief to many previously infested regions,
Founded by practical missionary Dr. John Henry House in 1902, with ten orphans for pupils and a native farmer-teacher for faculty, the American Farm School has grown to 300 acres of cultivated farmland worked by some 150 farmer-students aged 13 to 18, under the direction of a faculty of 17. including five of its own graduates. Two of these native instructors benefited by four years of additional training in engineering and husbandry at Princeton and Cornell respectively, on scholarships raised by Princeton classmates of the present director of the School, engineer son of the founder, Charles L. House, Princeton 1909.
Soundly managed, the American Farm School has even in depression times paid 70% to 75% of its operating expenses out of operating income from the sale of farm products, live stock, water supply, and electric power, plus students' fees. The remainder comes about half from income of invested funds and the rest in the form of annual contributions from friends in Greece and America. Cholera carried off $1,500 worth of pigs last year, and the unprecedented drought this spring probably means the loss of the year's crop. But the School survives such calamities as it has survived revolutions, wars, political crises and earthquakes, and has never had a deficit.
In addition to its services in curbing malaria, the School has checkmated phylloxera, destroyer of countless vineyards, by the importation from California of resistant grape stock on which native vines have been grafted to grow a variety immune to the blight.
Scant rainfall has been met with American dry farming methods yielding a 25% crop increase on the School's acreage in normal years. Cross breeding with imported strains has improved the native ''scrub'' live stock.
Appreciative of the School's services the Greek government provided in 1931 by Act of Parliament for the training of 200 scholarship boys in the next eight years. Through the School's rural extension work all Greece benefits by the introduction of American methods. The American Farm School exerts an influence far beyond its immediate environs, for the economic stability of paramount importance to present day Greece and to the peace of the Balkans.
The address of the New York office is: No. 17 East 42nd Street.
L. HOLLIXGSWORTH WOOD Treasurer
American Farm School Xew York City
-Profanity deleted.—ED.