6 10 AGRICULTURE, 



exports, and English cotton quotations. The papers in the 

 appendix embraced a wide range of subjects. The potato dis- 

 ease was exhaustively discussed. The commissioner stated 

 that the number of packages of seeds distributed in 1846 would 

 exceed 50,000. Additional facilities for obtaining information 

 and purchasing seeds were declared to be necessary to the suc- 

 cessful prosecution of the agricultural work of the office, a dec- 

 laration which did not prevent Congress from withholding, in 

 1846, the appropriation of a single dollar for agricultural pur- 

 poses for the ensuing year. When the Patent-Office report for 

 1846 appeared, agricultural statistics, essays, correspondence, 

 and newspaper articles were entirely omitted. 



Congress saw and acknowledged its error, .and the appropria- 

 tion ($3000) from the Patent-Office fund was restored in 1847. 

 The report for that year was especially rich in statistics relating 

 to the products of labor and capital in the United States, the 

 movements of these and foreign products on interior lines of 

 transportation, the consumption and surplus for exportation of 

 food products, the demands of foreign countries for these, and 

 tables of population, property, prices, etc. The volume was 

 more profusely and expensively illustrated than any that had 

 preceded it. In the report for the following year (1848), an 

 increased amount of space was occupied by miscellaneous sta- 

 tistics, chiefly industrial. The quantity of seeds distributed in 

 1848 had increased to 75,000 packages, and it was announced 

 that nearly as many had been obtained for distribution in 1849. 

 In this report mention is made of foreign seeds having been 

 submitted to the test of experiment, by an intelligent gardener. 



On the soth of April, 1849, Mr. Burke retired from the Patent 

 Office, and was succeeded by Hon. Thomas Ewbank, of New 

 York. By direction of the Secretary of the Interior, the task 

 of collating and arranging the materials for the agricultural por- 

 tion of the annual report was committed to a "practical and 

 scientific agriculturist." Another change consisted in the pub- 

 lication of the agricultural portion of the report in a separate 

 volume. The first of these volumes (for 1849) was edited, in 

 accordance with the Secretary's views, by a scientific gentleman, 

 Daniel Lee, M.D. It contained many elaborate scientific and 

 practical papers by Mr. Lee and others, and numerous commer- 



