Page:Men of Mark in America vol 1.djvu/99

Rh the weather bureau annually reports savings of millions of dollars by its storm, flood and frost warnings. Farmers and business men and transportation lines in the flooded districts of the great waterways are every spring brought to realize the great value of this service, while shipowners and seafaring men generally have it to thank with the passing of every storm of which it warned them.

The work of the Office of Experiment Stations has been greatly extended so that it now includes the direct management of the stations in Alaska, Hawaii and Porto Rico, along with the supervision of the state and territorial stations. It also has its nutrition and irrigation services and its cooperation with farmers’ institute work, the two latter having been added in the past eight years. The Office of Road Inquiry has come to make its chief work the practical building of roads and the examination and testing of road materials so as to give important aid to the work being done by the states. The library has grown from 60,000 volumes to 86,000. It has to its credit several valuable bibliographies, and is cooperating effectively with libraries, especially those which reach agricultural communities both in this country and abroad.

With the great development of the other branches of department work there has been a natural growth in the publication division. There have been many more manuscripts to edit and prepare for the printer, much increase of the details of making and illustrating books, and a growth in distribution of publications from six and a half million to more than twelve million copies. So extensive and varied have the publications become that a system of indexing is necessary in order to find and supply the information called for by the people. The work of the job printing office under this division has trebled in the past eight years.

Secretary Wilson in his first report announced it as the department policy “to encourage the introduction of what will enable our people to diversify their crops, and keep at home money that is now sent abroad to buy what the United States should produce.” To this policy he has consistently adhered. His attention was first turned to the great importations of sugar from regions no better adapted to sugar production than are parts of the United States. He at once imported large quantities of sugar-beet seed, and set the chemist with the aid of a special agent to determine what sections will grow beets of high sugar content. As a result of this work, the