120 STORRS AGRICULTURAL EXPERIMENT STATION. 
respiration calorimeter is being elaborated. This is an appara- 
tus in which an animal or a man may be placed for a number 
of hours or days, and the amounts and composition of the food 
and drink and inhaled air; the amounts and composition of the 
excreta, solid, liquid and gaseous; the potential energy of the 
materials taken into the body and given off from it; the quantity 
of heat radiated from the body; and the mechanical equivalent 
of the muscular work done, are all to be measured. ‘The ex- 
perimenting is complicated, costly and time-consuming. The 
results already obtained are, however, very encouraging in 
their promise of future success. 
PUBLIC AND PRIVATE AID TO THE INVESTIGATIONS. 
For an institution with an annual income of only $7,500 
per year, which up to July of this year has been the whole 
amount recetved by the Storrs Station from public sources, 
so large an investigation of foods might seem inexcusable. 
The justification is found in two facts. One is that the sev- 
eral lines of investigation upon the food and nutrition of man 
are more or less nearly parallel with those upon the nutrition 
of animals, which the Station is also prosecuting, and the two 
are so conducted as to really form one department of inquiry. 
The other is, that a considerable part of the work is done with 
little or no expense to the Station treasury. Free use is had 
of the rooms and apparatus in the chemical laboratory of 
Wesleyan University, whose trustees are desirous of pro- 
moting scientific research, especially that of the more abstract 
kind to which an already large and gradually increasing part 
of the investigation belongs. ‘The calorimetric investigations 
especially are of this order. The studies of dietaries were 
made in codperation with the U. S. Department of Labor, 
which bore a large part of the expense. The cost of the 
investigations of food exhibited at the World’s Fair was borne 
mainly by the Bureau of Awards of the Columbian Commis- 
sion. Considerable sums have been given from time to time by 
private individuals in aid of different parts of the more purely 
scientific inquiry. | 
It would be unjust to close even so brief an account of the 
development of these researches without more specific ac- 
knowledgment of the generosity of the contributors to the 

