STATES KELATIONS SERVICE. 559 



A station was established at Sitka and subsidiary stations have since 

 been maintained at Kenai (transferred to Kodiak in 1908), Copper 

 Center (transferred to Fairbanks in 1908), Rampart, Fairbanks, 

 Matanuska, and on Kodiak Island. C. C. Georgeson has been in 

 immediate charge of all the Alaska work since the beginning, and 

 Walter H. Evans, who joined the Washington force of the Office of 

 Experiment Stations in 1892, has represented that office in the 

 general supervision of this enterprise. 



Through extensive travel of station officers, reports by settlers on 

 their use of seeds distributed by the stations and on their other 

 agricultural operations, and a large amount of experimental work 

 with plants and animals, great progress has been made in determin- 

 ing the agricultural possibilities of this vast Territory. Much has 

 also been done in selecting and breeding varieties of plants adapted 

 to the soil and climatic conditions in different parts of Alaska. 

 Experiments with animals have also shown much regarding their 

 breeding, care, and management as related to Alaskan conditions. 

 It has been demonstrated that wheat, oats, barley, potatoes, and 

 many kinds of vegetables of good quality can be grown in different 

 parts of the Territory. Numerous gardens in many places now 

 regularly furnish settlers goodly contributions to their food supply 

 and a considerable number of farmers and horticulturists are carry- 

 ing on larger agricultural operations. A basis has thus been laid 

 by the station work for considerable agriculture in Alaska when 

 the growth of mining, lumbering, and other industries encourages 

 a sufficiently large influx of farming people. 



Stations under the management of the Office of Experiment Sta- 

 tions were established in Hawaii and Porto Rico in 1901 and in 

 Guam in 1908. A station maintained by the Danish Government 

 in the Virgin Islands was taken over when those islands were trans- 

 ferred to the United States in 1918. All these insular stations, 

 under the supervision of Doctor Evans, have done much to diversify 

 and improve the tropical agriculture and hoiiiculture of the islands 

 and have disseminated much useful information among their people 

 through publications and extension work. 



Among the greater accomplishments of the insular experiment 

 stations have been the introduction and establishment of many 

 improved forage plants as an essential to livestock improvement 

 in the islands. The stations have also led in the introduction of 

 purebred animals, with the result that the effect of the better blood 

 is becoming widely evident. 



The Hawaii station found that a disease which was doing great 

 damage to pineapples was due to excessive amounts of manganese 

 in the soil, and showed that spraying the plants with a solution 

 of iron sulphate corrects the trouble. These discoveries of the 

 station made possible the replanting of more than 10,000 acres 

 on which pineapple growing had been abandoned because of the 

 disease. This station has also shown the value of cover crops in the 

 Tropics and of rotations for sugar cane and pineapples, the leading 

 crops of Hawaii, and has been instrumental in widely extending 

 their use. The superiority of ammonium sulphate over nitrate of 

 soda for fertilizing rice is another important result of the work of 

 this station. 



