2 EXPERIMENT STATION EECORD. 



it is buried, material which is useful in itself when distributed to the 

 proper audience, but which serves to convey a wrong imj)ression to 

 the public mind and to the man of science as to the field and the 

 work of the experiment station. 



The annual report was formerly a place for technical papers of 

 permanent value, as well as a general review of the station's activities 

 for the year. This has come now to be very largely a purely adminis- 

 trative and fiscal report, brief and very general, often without even 

 an enumeration of the projects or lines of work conducted during 

 the year. As such it has ceased to have much interest or value as a 

 record of progi'ess. The coming of the Adams fund and the large 

 amount of investigation which has grown out of it, has not as yet had 

 a very noticeable influence on these reports or on the station publica- 

 tions as a whole. The Adams Act is supplying results of scientific 

 interest and of practical application, and in a way it is furnishing 

 a higher conception of experiment station work as a whole, but its 

 influence on the publications has thus far been restricted and has 

 been largely overshadowed by the demand for the more popular class. 



The actual condition wdth reference to the character of the publica- 

 tions sent out by the experiment stations is shown by an examination 

 of the records for the six months ended with April 1 of this year. 

 It is found that out of 276 publications issued during that period 

 104 are records of the experimental work of the stations. In other 

 words, only two-fifths of the total number of publications are of that 

 description. Seventeen of these record scientific investigations such 

 as would be appropriate under the Adams Act; 87 contain accounts of 

 field experiments, miscellaneous studies in entomology, plant path- 

 ology, and veterinary medicine, and minor laboratory work in dif- 

 ferent departments. 



Ninety j)ublications, or about one-third of the total number, are 

 miscellaneous popular publications covering a wide variety of sub- 

 jects. Eleven of these are resumes of more technical publications 

 recording experimental work, and some others contain more or less 

 definite references to such work, but most of them are properly 

 described as compilations of information from various, and usually 

 indeterminate, sources. More than half of them are brief circulars, 

 the relation of which to experimental work is quite remote. 



The remaining publications, nearly one-third of the whole num- 

 ber, are of a formal and routine character. Forty-four are called 

 forth by the inspection service, and there seems to be a tendency to 

 multiply publications of this kind by dividing the reports of inspec- 

 tion work into small sections. This is probably largely due to the 

 growing variety of inspection work, the results of which are of in- 



