BUREAU OF PLANT INDUSTRY. 301 



appointed to advise the Secretary of Agriculture in behalf of the 

 cotton interests of the country as to what should constitute the nine 

 official grades. The aim has been to match as exactly as possible the 

 original tvpes deposited by this committee with the Secretary of 

 Agriculture. To accomplish this object much experimenting has 

 been necessary and various expedients have been adopted. Several 

 improvements have been made in the method of preparing the grades. 

 The idea of protecting them by full-size photographs fastened in the 

 cover of each box seems especially to have met with approval. 



Composition or the grades. — Each of the nine official grades is 

 represented by a box containing twelve individual samples called 

 *' types." Care has been exercised to eliminate uncertainties and dif- 

 ficulties in connection with the grades by preparing them in such a 

 way that their appearance and character will change as little as pos- 

 sible with time. 



PAPER-PLANT INVESTIGATIONS. 



The object of the paper-plant investigations of the Bureau of Plant 

 Industry is to find fibers suitable for paper making that will offer at 

 least a partial substitute for wood, the diminishing supply of which 

 is accurately reflected by its constantly rising price. This substitute 

 is being sought (1) among the waste or by-products of our cultivated 

 crops, such as corn and broom-corn stalks, the stalks of saccharine 

 and nonsaccharine sorghums, rice, flax, and common grain straws, 

 hemp waste, and bagasse; (2) among plants that may possibly be 

 grown with profit especially for paper-making purposes, such as 

 hemp, esparto, jute, okra, Eulalia japonica, and several of the stand- 

 ard Japanese paper plants; and (3) among wild plants such as the 

 grasses, rushes, and sedges of our coastal and interior marshes, the 

 canes of the canebrakes, the yuccas, sotols, and certain grasses of the 

 dry Southwest. These investigations include both laboratory and 

 field tests, as well as semicommercial and commercial tests in paper 

 mills. 



Field and laboratory A^^ORK. — In the field work cornstalks have 

 been produced at selected stations in Kentucky, Iowa, Illinois, and 

 Missouri; broom-corn stalks in Indiana and Kansas; stalks of sev- 

 eral varieties of nonsaccharine sorghum at the dry-land experiment 

 farm of the Bureau at Dalhart, Tex., and hemp plants in the hemp- 

 growing sections of Kentucky and Indiana. In addition, numerous 

 other raw materials from cultivated and wild plants have been assem- 

 bled for tests from other sources. In the production and growing of 

 materials cooperation has been effected with numerous private indi- 

 viduals and with several offices of the Bureau. 



In the laboratory preliminary digestions have been made of corn, 

 broom corn, and hemp stalks, rice and flax straw, Colorado River 

 hemp {Seshania macrocarpa) ^ cotton-seed hull fiber, bagasse, esparto, 

 water hyacinth, Poseidonia (an Australian marine plant), saw-grass, 

 and several other materials. The purpose of these preliminai\y exper- 

 iments is to furnish a guide for the semicommercial tests at the paper 

 mills. The optimum time of cooking, pressure, chemicals, etc., are 

 here determined, and handmade sheets are produced for examination 

 and testing. All chemical determinations arc made in cooperation 

 with the Bureau of Chemistry, and a portion of the preliminary work 



