820 ANNUAL REPORTS OF DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE. 



established course. The last 3'ear's inspection showed that there has 

 been a general improvement in the methods of handling station 

 accounts. The voucher check system of accounting is coming into 

 use, and has been found to have many decided advantages; more care 

 is beinw exercised to secure uniformity in the classification of items, 

 which is of great value in comparison of expenditures of the various 

 stations; and the liabilities of the stations are more promptly met, 



AVith regard to the question of making a fixed charge against the 

 Federal funds for administrative expenses, which has come up at 

 different times, the office has held that in all causes where the director 

 of the station is a separate officer charged with the general manage- 

 ment of station affairs, the payment from these funds of a portion of 

 the salary of the president of the institution as a whole is not war- 

 ranted, and that the expense of station accounting should be limited 

 to only such a charge against the Hatch fund as is involved in the 

 simple bookkeeping required by this department to show how the 

 $30,000 of the Hatch and Adams funds has been expended each year. 

 Experience has shown that when a station is properly organized the 

 expenses connected with the conduct of its financial affairs can be re- 

 duced to a relatively small amount. Efforts have been continued to 

 secure a larger amount of definite experimental work with the Hatch 

 fund, by relieving it from charges for general maintenance, compiled 

 publications, demonstrations, and various forms of extension work. 



The insistence by this office that the Federal funds (both Hatch 

 and Adams) shall be held strictly to experimental work, and not used 

 for extension work and other lines of endeavor not clearly experi- 

 mental, instead of being a hardship to the stations in aiding them 

 and the colleges with which they are connected in putting their work 

 on a sound basis, and securing adequate State aid for important work 

 which can not be provided for out of the Hatch and Adams funds. 

 In some States the appropriations for extension work are greater in 

 amount than the Federal funds, and in most States the Federal funds, 

 if their use for the purpose were legitimate, would be inadequate to 

 support a uniformly efficient extension service for the entire State. 



Realizing from the beginning the importance and necessity of 

 using the Federal funds for experimental and research work only, 

 the office has emphasized the need of systematizing the extension 

 work and organizing it under the supervision of the agricultural 

 colleges. It is essentially an important feature of agricultural educa- 

 tion, and it is held to be primarily the business of the State to pro- 

 vide for an extension system in agriculture within its borders. In the 

 nature of the case the responsibility for it necessarily rests on the 

 agricultural colleges, although valuable assistance is derived in many 

 instances from the National and State departments of agriculture. 



To realize what progress has been made along this line we have 

 only to consider that already some form of organization for extension 

 teaching in agriculture exists in 43 of the State agricultural colleges, 

 and in all of these institutions extension directors have been ap- 

 pointed and placed in charge of the work. Of these only eight are 

 also directors of experiment stations, which indicates a prevailing 

 tendency to place extension work on an independent footing and 

 separate it from experiment station work proper. Under this ar- 

 rangement the investigator is freed from the burden of giving gen- 

 eral agricultural instruction to all classes of the agricultural public, 



