24 Director's Repoet of the 



class and 82 per ct. of the dairies had dropped back into the 

 " medium " class. In a number of cases the tuberculin test was not 

 renewed in the year and the reacting animals removed; the cleaning 

 of the cows was generally omitted and in some cases their bodies 

 were allowed to become well coated with dried excrement; frequently 

 little or no attention was given to the cooling of the milk; cobwebs, 

 dust and general litter accumulated in the stables, and the barn- 

 yards often become choked and muddy from the accumulation of 

 manure. It should be noted that the failure to attend to these 

 details saved money or saved labor, which under present conditions, 

 amounts to the same thing to the producer. It should also be noted 

 that, with the exception of the tuberculin test, there was no single 

 day when any one of the above conditions could have been said to 

 have changed from good to bad. The resulting bad conditions were 

 the cumulative result of a gradual lowering of the standard of 

 doing business. 



This investigation is reported in Bulletin No. 363. 



An electrical incubator. — An absolute necessity for any bacterio- 

 logical laboratory is an incubator where constant temperatures, 

 sometimes warmer and sometimes colder than ordinary room tem- 

 peratures, can be maintained. Such an incubator of a very efficient 

 type has been constructed in the laboratory and because of the fact 

 that its construction involved many new features, a technical bulletin, 

 No. 29, was prepared describing these features for the benefit of 

 similar laboratories. 



BOTANICAL DEPARTMENT. 



Currant cane-necrosis. — This disease has been very destructive in 

 the Hudson Valley. It has been held that cane-necrosis can be 

 controlled by summer pruning, i. e., by removing the diseased canes 

 at intervals during the summer; but a practical field test of the 

 method, covering six seasons, shows that summer pruning can not 

 be depended upon to keep the disease under control. At no time 

 during the course of the experiment was there any indication that 

 the treatment had materially checked the disease. Details of the 

 experiment are given in Bulletin No. 357. 



Seed testing. — Bulletin No. 3G2 contains an account of the seed 

 work of the Station during 1912. The seed law which went into 



