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Three reports have been published and the fourth is about to come out. Reprints 
of many reports on the separate areas have already been received. The fifth report 
is in preparation and will be ready to goto the printer about the middle of February. 
Congress has ordered a large edition of 17,000 copies of the bound report for distribu- 
tion. This gives each Representative only about 1<> copies, and each Senator about 
33 copies, and the Department of Agriculture 8,000 copies. The Secretary last year 
recommended a change in the method of publishing and distributing the reports, 
asking that leave be granted to publish advance sheets, so that reports of each area 
can be sent to the printer as soon as the work is completed instead of having to wait 
until the middle of February, when the year's work is finished, and thus keeping 
the reports in the office from eight to twelve months after the held work is com- 
pleted. The bill failed of passage in the last days of the last Congress, but it is prob- 
able that such a change will be enacted at the coming session. This will give each 
Representative in whose district the survey is made 2,000 copies, and will give each 
Senator from that State 500 copies, and the Department of Agriculture 1,000 copies 
tor its use. In the edition of 17,000 copies the maps cost about 9 cents apiece, so 
that a reprint is not very expensive, although the aggregate cost of this large edition 
is very great. 
With twenty parties continuously in the field, spending from three to six or nine 
months in an area, the Bureau is getting hold of a vast fund of information about 
localities, about the possibilities of changing the methods of cultivation, and the pos- 
sibilities of introducing new crops and new industries, but in the continual move- 
ment of our parties from area to area, it is impossible for them to take the time to 
impress in any other way than through their reports these facts upon the fanners. 
It is inadvisable for us to leave them in an area longer than the time necessary to 
make their survey and finish their report, so that much of the good of the informa- 
tion obtained by the Bureau is lost — is buried — and has little effect upon the people. 
As you know, matters treated of in reports of this kind are lightly passed over, espe- 
cially so by a conservative class of farmers such as we have. In many cases it has 
been possible for us to force these matters upon the attention of the people by actual 
demonstration work, as, with the introduction of the Sumatra tobacco in the Con- 
necticut Valley; as we are doing in the introduction of the Cuban filler leaf on cer- 
tain soils that we have encountered in the South; as with the demonstration work 
we are doing in the reclamation of alkali lands in the West, where it has been taught 
for years that certain methods could be used for the reclamation of these lands, but 
no active movement lias ever been started for their actual preservation and reclama- 
tion. The Bureau is now able, through its appropriations, to take up certain tracts 
for demonstration. We have three such alkali tracts now in process of reclamation, 
and we are taking up three more — six tracts in different parts of the country — where 
we are actually reclaiming alkali fields and are attracting attention that we could not 
expect to get from the publications alone. 
In the classification of the soils of an area and the collection of data relative to the 
uses they can be put to, it is necessary for us to have all the information we can get 
through any means that may be necessary as to the use of the soils for crops, and as 
to the necessity for different methods for their proper and most economical use. 
One of the most important subjects that has appealed to us, and, as you will recog- 
nize, appeals to anyone, is the manipulation and handling of the soil for any particular 
crop it is desired to grow. 
One of the most important problems in connection with this has been the relation 
of the chemistry of the soil to crop production; a subject that has vexed the world 
for the past seventy-live or one hundred years. What relation is there between the 
plant food in the soil and the yields obtained by ordinary methods of cultivation? 
It has seemed to me that one of the most important lines of work that the Bureau 
could take up, an essential feature of the work of the Bureau, was to do all we could 
to develop and extend information along these as well as along physical lines. We 
have just published, as you are all aware, a bulletin, No. 22, on certain conclusions 
we have arrived at from investigations on the chemistry of the soil as related to crop 
production. 
Since this bulletin was published we have continued our investigations and have 
obtained many new results, and as I have been aware that a great deal of interest has 
been shown in this bulletin and some misunderstanding, perhaps, of the purpose and 
scope of the work, it has seemed to me that it would be well in connection with my 
talk to-day to take you into my confidence a little bit more, I regret to say, than I 
would otherwise like to at this stage of the work. We are not quite ready to publish 
our results; the investigation is not completed; and I speak of these matters rather 
unwillingly, because I should like to have presented them as a finished result rather 
than in the preliminary way in which I shall have to ask you to receive them now. 
The subject was left in Bulletin 22 with the general statement that our investiga- 
