UNITED STATES DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE 9 



The Department is organized into eleven scientific bureaus 

 as follows : weather, animal industry, plant industry, forest serv- 

 ice, chemistry, soils, entomology, biological survey, statistics, 

 experimental stations, and public roads. All of these are doing 

 much to encourage and help agricultural education throughout 

 the country. In a general way they reach the people through 

 publications, a great many of which are distributed free (6, 7, 9) 

 while others are for sale at a nominal price (7, 8). Those for 

 free distribution are as a rule written in a popular style, free 

 from technical terms, and are easily understood by the aver- 

 age reader. The series known as "Farmers' Bulletins" contains 

 contributions from all the bureaus and there is scarcely any 

 phase of agriculture that has not received attention. These 

 bulletins are especially useful to elementary and secondary 

 schools giving instruction in agriculture (7). Many of them 

 dealing with such subjects as birds, insects, tree planting, school 

 gardening, and plant propagation would be useful in any ele- 

 mentary or high school. 



Besides general contributions to agricultural education made 

 by all the bureaus of the Department, certain bureaus are taking 

 an active part in public education. 



The Weather Bureau from its central office at Washington 

 and through its officials at various stations throughout the 

 country is doing much to encourage the study of meteorology. 



During the school year a million or more children of the public schools 

 make weather observations and study the daily weather maps and fore- 

 casts. From its earliest days the Weather Bureau has co-operated to some 

 extent in public-school work, and during the past ten years this co-operation 

 has been widely extended. The public schools and the Weather Bureau 

 have a mutual interest in the matter. The school authorities have found 

 in the study of the weather with the assistance of the Weather Bureau a 

 means of satisfying part of the requirements of modern methods of study; 

 and the Weather Bureau is able through the school gradually to dispell 

 popular superstitions and fallacious beliefs that have hampered its work 

 .... and to enable both the commercial and the agricultural world to make 

 more intelligent and more complete use of the forecasts, special warnings, 

 weather maps, and climatological publications (10, p. 267). 



