Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 76.djvu/535

Rh information as to species and stocks of mammals and birds and fishes, for insect mates to symbiotic plants and insect enemies to noxious organisms, and even for germs and cultures affecting the course of organic progress. Meantime the Bureau of Animal Industry is not only acquiring and diffusing definite knowledge concerning stocks and breeding and feeding, but is importing and acclimating and crossing the animals with the view of supplying each section with forms adapted to its particular conditions and requirements. Thereby the domesticated animals are modified and adjusted to a complex industrial mechanism, each yielding flesh or milk or leather or textile or eggs or feathers or labor after its kind in connection with the human purpose; and if the natural powers are feeble or aimless, they are so redirected and intensified as to increase the efficiency of the organisms in promoting the welfare of men and nations.

Broadly, the functions of the other Federal Departments pertain chiefly to relations among men, those of the Department of Agriculture chiefly to the relations between men and nature. Its primary purpose, both logical and legal, is to increase and diffuse knowledge concerning those fundamentals of human power and prosperity residing in the soil and its products. In carrying out this purpose, it necessarily assimilates and promotes that consciously organized and definite knowledge pertaining to nature which constitutes both the subject-matter and the object-matter of science; and with its growth it has been called on to make all manner of applications, from the extirpation of insect pests to the protection of the purity of foods and medicines for men and the making of roads for moving the produce of the soil. Its final function, which has arisen and taken form with its growth, is the redirection of natural processes and powers along lines which are not only prevised, but clearly preconceived in relation to ends—and hence are practical. In performing this function, it deals constantly with the four primal elements in their relation to man; beginning with the earth, it progressively increases the efficiency of soils and plants and animals; and through this element it utilizes and so gains partial control over the air, the water and the power of the sun—and the measure of the efficiency is human power and prosperity.

Thus far the relations chiefly considered in the Department of Agriculture have been those of nature, and of men to nature, adapted to increasing the efficiency of nature for human ends; there has been little effort to apply the natural powers to men or to increase their efficiency except by arming them with better knowledge. The time for directly increasing human efficiency by intensifying human power has hardly come; yet it may easily be descried as the next stage in the development of relations between men and nature.