New York Agricultural Experiment Station. 13 



a supply of copies with which to meet subsequent requests and 

 to fill incomplete sets for the officers of other stations. 



A newspaper summary, written concisely and in a popular 

 style, is now prepared for each bulletin. This is mailed to all 

 state papers and to some others, and is copied wholly or in part 

 by nearly all the papers which publish agricultural matter. The 

 outcome of this must be to call widespread attention to the work 

 which the Station is doing. 



It seems desirable that one other step should be taken towards 

 rendering more available and popular the information contained 

 in the Station publications. Everyone who has had experience 

 realizes the great difficulty and even impossibility of writing an 

 account of an investigation that shall give reasonably full data 

 and at the same time be sufficiently simple and clear to be un- 

 derstood by the great mass of unprofessional readers. It is to be 

 feared that the present somewhat extended bulletins, requiring 

 as they do close attention to discover the lessons which they 

 teach, sometimes discourage rather than encourage those who 

 are beginning to seek for aid. At the present time the full bul- 

 letins are issued to the entire mailing list of 25,000 names. It 

 is not improbable that the larger part of these fails to accom- 

 plish much in the way of imparting information, and the expense 

 of printing them is too great to allow their waste. 



It is necessary, though, both to write the extended bulletin 

 and to convey its lessons to the agricultural public, and the plan 

 which it is proposed to follow in the future is to print a sutfi- 

 ciently large edition of each complete bulletin to cover the ex- 

 periment station and professional exchange list and to meet the 

 requests that will come from the higher class of readers, and 

 then to send to the large mailing list a popular and practical 

 resum6 of the bulletin, written, if possible, in a manner that shall 

 prove attractive and helpful. This plan will be less expensive 

 than the present one, and can scarcely fail to augment the value 

 and influence of the Station. 



The Annual Report. — This is printed by the state printers, and 

 sometimes is not issued for nearly a year after the copy is put 



