362 REPORT OF OFFICE OF EXPERIMENT STATIONS. 



question of the fooil supply of troops and of camp cookery has always 

 been one oallinjjj for careful study, and the results of such investiga- 

 tions are frequently of value to the students of general nutrition, as 

 are similar ones conducted by the Navy Department. 



The more strictly economic phases of the question, such as the rela- 

 tion of the cost of food to the other items of expenditure, and the 

 statistics of the production and consumption of food products, fall 

 within the province of the Department of Commerce and Labor, which 

 now includes the Bureau of of the Census. The Bureau of Fisheries 

 of the same department also furnishes valuable data regarding Ameri- 

 can food fishes. 



In the Department of Agriculture various features of the subject 

 are naturally investigated, as the utilization of agricultural products 

 as food for man is a very important part of the general subject of 

 agriculture. The Bureau of Chemistry is charged with the chemical 

 examination not only of agricultural products, but under the Food 

 and Drugs Act, with the inspection of all materials coming within 

 the scope of that law. 



Similarly, the Bureau of Plant Industry, though it works primarily 

 to improve crop production, nevertheless, by its studies of new 

 varieties of food plants and of old varieties grown under special con- 

 ditions, contributes to the knowledge of the nutritive values of these 

 products. In like manner, the Bureau of Animal Industry, in con- 

 ducting studies of meat, poultry, and dairy products, and also in 

 investigating the problems of animal metabolism, has added much of 

 value to the science of human nutrition. Such features of the work 

 of these bureaus bring out the fact that very many food questions are 

 in the last analysis agricultural questions. 



During the last fifteen or twenty years special nutrition investiga- 

 tions have been carried on by congressional appropriations, placed 

 under the direction of the Office of Experiment Stations of the Depart- 

 ment of Agriculture, which serves as a sort of national clearing- 

 house for the agricultural experiment stations now existing in all the 

 States and Territories of the Union, and which, therefore, is in an 

 unusually good position not only to coordinate and assist the work 

 being done by individual investigators at the stations and elsewhere, 

 but also to disseminate the results of such work. In the past little 

 actual research was done in the central office in Washington, the work 

 of which consisted rather in planning and publishing the results of 

 research carried out by the cooperating investigators or institutions 

 elsewhere; but since the completion of the new laboratories of the 

 Department of Agriculture, the work formerly carried on in Middle- 

 town, Conn., with the Atwater-Rosa respiration calorimeter and other 

 lines of investigations, has been moved to Washington. Among the 



