686 ANNUAL REPORT OF THE Off. Doc. 



containing substances mixed with malt, lilcewise furnish a kiln-dried 

 product of highly vai'icd composition, according to the kind of alco- 

 hol-producing material used; and from our abattoirs come blood- 

 meal, beef scrap and flesh meal, while dried; fine ground fish also 

 appeared upon the cattle food market. That a cattle feeder might 

 easily be bewildered in determining which of these many articles 

 sold at widely varying prices he should select for his use in order that 

 he may obtain the best and most economical result, is not strange. 

 In addition to the great variety of products resulting from such 

 legitimate and praise-worthy efforts to find economical uses for waste 

 products, the difficulties of the consumer are still further increased 

 by the fact that adulteration of cattle foods is not at all an uncom- 

 mon practice, though it has been much less frequently reported in 

 America than in Europe. There are, nevertheless, a good maoy in- 

 stances on record in which cotton hulls have been unduly admixed 

 with cotton-seed meal, in which oat chaff has appeared in excess of 

 its proper preparation in its chop, and in which the proportion of 

 corn bran in glutea feed has been somewhat excessive. In New 

 England, within two or three years, the discovery of admixture of 

 ground corn cobs with brans imported from the middle western 

 States was made. Since the contents of the dust bin of the flouring 

 mills are now used in the manufacture of feeding stuffs for cattle, 

 the casual sale of such materials under the names of those of better 

 quality is to be anticipated. In Europe, where the pressed cakes 

 of a great variety of seeds used in the manufacture of vegetable oils 

 are employed for feeding purposes, the substitution of the cheaper 

 for the more expensive is a matter of quite common occurrence; even 

 castor pomace, which is poisonous to cattle, is sometimes introduced 

 and the presence of saw dust has been noted; while the occurrence 

 of cockle, darnel and ergot, as well as other poison-containing 

 materials, is a matter of no infrequent occurrence. 



The need for systematic examination of commercial concentrated 

 feeding stuffs was recognized in the thickly populated countries of 

 Europe early in the past century and one of the avowed objects of 

 the establishment of the first Germaii Experiment Station at Moeck- 

 ern in 1851 was the investigation of such materials. These early 

 stations in Germany were established, it is of interest to recall, by 

 agricultural societies. The work in this direction has grown to 

 such a degree that there are to day, in Germany alone, about thirty 

 stations engaged in the work of cattle food control. 



In England, the Royal Agricultural Society employed a chemist 

 to make similar investigations. 



In America, some sporadic work of this kind was done by the ex- 

 periment stations at the very outstart of their history, but the first 

 legislation providing for continuous systematic work in this line was 



