NOTES AND COMMENT 



The sixth of the new series of bulletins of the Department of Agri- 

 culture is a capital example of the conveyance of technical knowledge 

 to the general public in a usable form. Mr. F. V. Coville has been 

 working for several years on some of the economic plants which thrive 

 on acid soils, and in the bulletin under notice he has discussed the 

 utilization of acid soils by the selection of such crops as are tolerant 

 of the conditions they present. 



The new scheme of publication which has been adopted by the De- 

 partment of Agriculture is sure to make for a wider dissemination and 

 utilization of the practical results secured by its workers, wathout con- 

 fronting the layman with a bewildering mass of technical details. The 

 one danger which is most imminent in the scheme is that it may not 

 be possible for the department to publish all of the purely scientific 

 papers which are submitted by its bureaus. There are already many 

 contributions of the highest value lying upon the slielves of the Depart- 

 ment, destined to be delayed in publication or else to be buried for all 

 time. If it is a function of our government to incur the expense of 

 scientific work it should be not only its function but its duty to pro- 

 vide for the publication of such work. 



Mr. George B. Sudworth has issued, as a publication of the Forest 

 Service, an atlas showing the detailed distribution of the thirty-six 

 species of pines which occur north of southern Mexico. The maps are 

 15 by 29 inches in size, and are sufficiently detailed to constitute a dis- 

 tinct contribution to our knowledge of the ranges of the pines. We 

 regret to learn that there is little likelihood of the continuation of the 

 atlas to cover other genera of trees. 



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