Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 68.djvu/192

188 raised this year. The propaganda for sugar-beet culture was inaugurated soon after the present secretary came to the department, and the widespread tests of its adaptation to different parts of the country have shown the regions especially adapted to the crop and been followed by a nearly tenfold increase in beet-sugar production.

The Weather Bureau has greatly extended the range of its observations and its investigation in the domain of meteorological science, with the result of increasing efficiency and a wider application of its work. It is now said to be the most highly developed weather service in the world. The soil survey has been entirely developed under the present administration, and constitutes the first systematic attempt to make a comprehensive soil survey of the United States. In economic entomology there have been very important developments, and the scope of the work has been more than doubled, not to mention the extensive scale on which the Bureau of Entomology has worked in the campaign against the cotton boll weevil.

The Bureau of Animal Industry, in addition to stamping out an outbreak of the foot-and-mouth disease in New England, has attained very important results in the study of animal diseases and their control, and the meat inspection in its charge has very materially increased. The inspection work has also been extended under the Bureau of Chemistry to other food products intended for export and import, and a system of food standards has been worked out as a basis for guidance in federal, state and municipal food inspection.

These are only a few of the many lines enumerated in which investigation has been inaugurated or important progress made. The showing is a gratifying one, and affirms how definite has been the aim in expanding and developing the department to meet the manifold needs of our unusually diverse agriculture. In a word, its twofold object has been 'to add to the sum of intelligence of the man, and to increase the productive capacity of the acre.' In this it has been strongly supported by the agricultural experiment stations of the country, to which the secretary makes appreciative acknowledgment. "Not only have the stations been a vital factor in making the department's work more effective," he says, "but they have by their own investigations lifted American agriculture to a higher plane." These two great agencies working together have laid the foundation of a science of agriculture as a basis for teaching and practise, and have won the confidence and appreciation not only of the farmers but of the general public.

meeting of the association at New Orleans during the Christmas holidays was thoroughly enjoyed by those members who were able to be present, and was of service in increasing in the south the influence of the association and interest in scientific work. The attendance was small, only 233 members being registered, but this was foreseen. The trip from the main centers of scientific activity was long for the Christmas holidays, and in most of the sciences meetings were being held simultaneously in more accessible places. The total number of scientific workers in the south is lamentably small. It appears from a computation recently made of the residence of the thousand leading men of science of the United States that only four of them live in the states of Georgia, Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi; whereas there are 144 in Massachusetts, 43 in Connecticut, 35 in New Jersey and 47 in Maryland. The south has enjoyed a noteworthy development in its material resources in the past decade, and there is every reason to assume that its universities and other institutions concerned with the advancement of science