154 AGRICULTURAL REPORT. : 
affirms that no one realizes fally the value and “‘comfort of having an 
assemblage of such facts, scattered through innumerable reports and 
papers, brought together into one focus year after year, so that the experi- 
menter and theorizer may have a large number of ascertained facts 
with which to compare his own experiments and his own theories.” 
The special investigations of the past year, many of which are not 
yet complete, include an examination into the industrial condition and 
progress of settlement and improvement of our immense Rocky Moun- 
tain area; the evidences of industrial diversification, and the adoption 
of advanced agricultural practice in the Southern States; the possibili- 
ties of great natural advantage in the introduction of plants manifestly 
suited to some section or climate of the country; the diseases and mor- 
tality of farm animals; the question of transportation of farm products, 
its cost and its abuses; the development of the industrial college enter- 
prise; the progress of beet-sugar making, forest culture, silk production, 
and other enterprises by which the varied tastes and capacities of our 
population, native and immigrant, may be utilized, the major industries 
of agriculture relieved from injurious competition in production, and 
the minor products required by the increasing wants of our civilization 
may be obtained from our own soils by our own labor. 
Much labor has been expended in the collection of facts illustrating 
the resources and settlement of Western America, the great region west 
of the valley of the Missouri, and fragments of this information may be 
found in the present report; but the theme is so large, the territory 
which it covers being continental in extent, and so isolated as to render 
its thorough canvass a difficult enterprise, that new and more extended 
researches will be undertaken, with the hope of presenting the freshest 
and most complete and condensed view of the capabilities and agri- 
cultural condition of this new territory ever yet offered to the public. A 
great obstacle to full success in this undertaking has been the extremely 
limited appropriations available for such work. 
Another important investigation, which is not yet complete, has rela- 
tion to the changes in the agriculture of the South, its products, pro- 
cesses, and labor. A section only of this material has been embodied in 
the present volume. Much valuable information has been obtained 
relative to the truck-farming and fruit-growing of this region, partly 
for local supply but mainly for northern markets; and the subject will 
be more fully examined for presentation in the next report. The rapid 
development of new enterprises in the production of subtropical fruits 
in Florida will greatly enhance the interest and value of a report thus 
necessarily deferred to include the operations of 1871. 
While this work has been continued by the Department, mainly by its 
reguiar working force and through its peculiar machinery and channels 
of communication, the arrangement of its collected material has been 
in some cases confided to experts employed temporarily for the purpose. 
Of. the matter which follows in the present volume, that relative to 
Epizootit apiha, the foot and mouth disease of cattle, which caused se 
much alarm in New York and New England, is given under the author- 
ity of Professor James Law, of Cornell University; the examination 
into the anatomy and diseases of the horse’s foot was made by Professor 
ZT. RK. Crosby, of the New Hampshire Agricultural College; the pecu- 
liarities of the agricultural patents of the year have been considered by 
Dr. J. Brainard, agricultural examiner in the Patent Office; the article 
on the food fishes of Alaska is supplementary to a former report upon 
the resources of that Territory, by Mr. Wm. H. Dall; in the arrangement 
of the abundant material descriptive of the character and abuses of the 
