347 



Miscellaneous. 



this branch is too familiar to call for comment. Public opinion has undergone 

 a great change, and a sound national sentiment has been created. The large and 

 varied interests dependent upon the forest have been awakened to the urgent 

 need of making provision for the future, and States have been led to enact wise 

 laws and enter upon a well-considered forest policy. The Secretary holds that 

 if the Forest Service had not taken the lead in finding out just how practical 

 rules for conservative lumbering might be laid down and carried out, forestry 

 would not have reached the point at which it now stands in the United States. 



The agricultural experiment stations in Alaska, Hawaii, aud Porto Rico 

 have been established and placed upon an efficient working basis under the 

 present administration, and the influence and assistance of the Department have 

 thus spread to these remote possessions. The investigations in problems relating 

 to irrigation from an agricultural standpoint, as distinguished from that of 

 engineering, have been inaugurated and organized upon a comprehensive scale. 

 This work has proved so eminently practical and so important to irrigated agri- 

 culture that it has grown rapidly in extent and in the scope covered in its studies 

 Out of it have sprung the work in land drainage, which has already demonstrated 

 great possibilities of usefulness, and the still newer investigations upon agri- 

 cultural machinery, so that there has been created and put into operation a new 

 feature of work covering the whole range of rural engineering, as a highly important 

 division of the Department's activities. 



The Weather Bureau has greatly extended the range of its observations 

 and investigation, which has been attended by increasing efficiency and a wider 

 application of its work. It is now said to be the most highly developed weather 

 service in the world. The work in economic entomology has been extended to 

 many new lines of study upon injurious and beneficial insects of the farm, garden, 

 forest, and household, and has been more than doubled in scope, not to mention 

 the extensive scale on which the Bureau has worked in the campaign against the 

 cotton-boll weevil. The soil survey has been entirely developed during the 

 present administration, and constitutes the first systematic attempt to make a 

 comprehensive soil survey of the United States. 



The Secretary points to the successful eradiction of the foot-and-mouth 

 disease in New England, and the diverse efforts which have been made to offset the 

 evils of the cotton-boll weevil in the Southern States, both prosecuted with special 

 appropriations for the purpose. In the latter connection, as well as independent 

 of it, the breeding and selection of plants and varieties better adapted to special 

 conditions or uses has been a conspicuous feature ; and closely related to it is 

 the introduction of plants from foreign countries. In 1898 Secretary Wilson secured 

 authority to use a small portion of the Congressional seed fund for agricultural 

 exploration, which has resulted in extensive introduction of seed and plants which 

 have been tested the country over. The largest collection of date palm varieties 

 in the world has been secured in this way, and several important cereal intro- 

 ductions have been made, such as dummor macaroni wheat, the Spanish select oat, 

 and the Sixty-day oat. Durum wheat was first introduced from Russia in the 

 spring of 1899. It is estimated that from twelve to fifteen million bushels of this 

 wheat were grown this year in the three States of North Dakota, South Dakota, 

 Minnesota, and that the crop in other sections of the country will bring the 

 production up to twenty million bushels for the entire country. This wheat has 

 evidently passed the experimental stage aud is now an established crop in a consider- 

 able number of the semi arid States. 



Referring to the propaganda for sugar-beet culture, inaugurated soon after 

 the present Secretary came to the Department, and the widespread tests of its 



