THE UNITED STATES DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE 
AND ITS BIOLOGICAL SURVEY 
Probably no investigations now being carried on in connec- 
tion with the many-sided scientific work of the U. S. DeiDartment 
of Agriculture Avill be more productive of beneficial results than 
those which are being conducted in the Division of Biological 
Surve}^, under the direction of Dr C. Hart Merriam. Six years 
ago Congress authorized the Department to institute a compre- 
hensive investigation of the geographical distribution of plants 
and animals, but it made no change in the official designation 
of the division — that of Ornithology and Mammalogy — to which 
this important work was to be assigned. At the last session of 
Congress, however, this omission was made good, and now the 
study of the distribution of life in the United States with refer- 
ence to the adaptation of different sections of the country to 
different agricultural and horticultural products will no longer 
be even nominall}^ subordinated to those less ini])ortant though 
most useful investigations in which Dr Merriam and his collabo- 
rators have hitherto been mainly engaged. 
During the last half-dozen }'-ears American agriculture has 
been passing through a period of transition, consequent in part 
upon a sudden shifting of the agricultural center of gravit}’’ and 
in part upon an unusuall}" prolonged era of low prices. It has 
been a time of cbange and experimentation, and millions of dol- 
lars have unquestionably been wasted through ignorance of the 
complex relations of the different products of the soil to the con- 
ditions under which their growth to maturit}'’ can most effectu- 
all}^ be promoted. Although, with the exception of the cotton 
plant and the M'^est India sugar cane, all the principal agricult- 
ural products of the United States have come, through the 
adaptation, either natural or artificial, of one or another of their 
varieties to local conditions, to have a range of successful culti- 
vation almost as far-extending as the country itself, there is not 
one of them, nor a single variet}^ of one of them, that has not an 
area within which its yield is more certain, more perlect, and 
more abundant than it is anywhere else, and this area is as defi- 
nitely ascertainable as is the geograi»hic distrihiition of the hum- 
ming-bird or the long-leaved pine, fi'u discover these regions of 
•lo.'i 
