Guelph, where luncheon was served and visitors were escorted over the grounds and through the buildings by the members of the faculty. The president, Dr. James Mills, explained to the association the work and purpose of the college.

At a business meeting on Wednesday several amendments to the constitution, proposed at the last annual meeting, were considered and adopted. Among them was one providing for representation of this Department in the association by two delegates, one from the Department at large and one from the Office of Experiment Stations. Resolutions were passed expressing appreciation of the interest manifested by the Department and the Office in the institute work and in the meetings of the association, and approving the step which has been taken in establishing, an agency in the Department for its promotion and aid.

St. Louis was selected as the place of the next meeting, the date being left for the executive committee to fix.

The business of the Office of Experiment Stations has continued to grow during the past year, and several new features have been especially developed. The work in relation to the farmers' institutes has been put on a permanent basis, and systematic efforts are now being made to bring the Department into close relations with the State organizations through which the institutes are managed. Attendance at the institutes now aggregates about 1,000,000 persons. It is believed that they may be made a very effective means for the more thorough dissemination of the information gathered by this Department and the experiment stations. There has been increased interest in the work of the Office relating to agricultural education. During the past year special emphasis has been placed on encouraging the establishment of secondary and elementary courses in agriculture. The agricultural experiment stations in Hawaii and Porto Rico have made good progress in the institution of systematic investigations, and gratifying recognition of the value of the work of these stations has been made by the insular governments, as indicated by liberal appropriations for their equipment and the extension of their work. In Alaska a beginning has been made of investigations in the Copper River Valley, where there is a large region suited to agriculture, and it is hoped that means may be provided for the establishment of a permanent station in this region. In the irrigation investigations greater attention has been given to studies of the duty of water in different regions and for various crops, with a view of determining how the water supply of the irrigated region may be most economically and efficiently used. Attention has also been given to the legal and economic problems involved in the use of interstate streams for irrigation. Special efforts are being made to enlarge the work of the Office in the investigation of problems relating to farm machinery and the use of different kinds of power for agricultural purposes. It is believed that the investigations in this line might be extended with great advantage to the agriculture of the country. Their results would also aid the agricultural colleges to put on an efficient basis the courses in farm mechanics, for which there is now a great demand and which some of these institutions are already establishing. A new feature of the nutrition investigations has been a large cooperative investigation in

the Government Hospital for the Insane in the District of Columbia, which has resulted in showing that, while the diet given the patients. and employees in that institution was ample as regards its nutritive value, greater variety might be afforded, and at the same time much waste might be avoided, by stricter supervision of the food supply as related to its nutritive value. Important investigations on the digestibility of cereals, fruits, and meat were completed, and reports on a large series of metabolism experiments with the respiration calorimeter were prepared for publication. In cooperation with the Association of American Agricultural Colleges and Experiment Stations, the Office has undertaken a large amount of work in connection with an exhibit of the progress of agricultural education and research at the St. Louis Exposition.

LINES OF WORK.

The work of the Office of Experiment Stations during the past year, as heretofore, has included the supervision of the expenditures of the stations; conferences and correspondence with station officers regarding the management, equipment, and work of the stations; the collection and dissemination of information regarding the progress of agricultural education and research throughout the world by means of technical and popular bulletins; the management of the agricultural experiment stations in Alaska, Hawaii, and Porto Rico; special investigations on the nutrition of man and on irrigation, conducted largely in cooperation with experiment stations, educational institutions, and other agencies in different States and Territories. A new feature of the work of the Office has been the systematic promotion of the interests of the farmers' institutes throughout the United States.

INCOME.

The income of the Office during the past fiscal year, derived wholly from appropriations by Congress, was as follows:

During the year the Office published 44 documents, aggregating 4,112 pages, a substantial increase over the output of the previous year. The publications issued include 13 numbers of the Experiment Station Record, 14 technical bulletins, 2 bulletins of the Porto Rico

Experiment Station (English and Spanish editions), 2 reports, 4 Farmers' Bulletins (including 2 numbers of the subseries Experiment Station Work), 3 circulars, and 4 articles for the Yearbook of the Department. Two other numbers of the Experiment Station Record and 7 bulletins, containing 1,027 pages, were prepared and submitted for publication during the year. The policy of reprinting separates of individual articles contained in larger reports has been continued with the same satisfactory results as heretofore. Eighty-one such separates, aggregating 2,074 pages, have been reprinted in editions. of varying size to meet the actual demand for the articles. Several documents formerly printed separately by Congress were combined in the Annual Report of the Office of Experiment Stations, as was done last year.

Experiment Station Record, Vol. XIV, pp. 1267.-This contains abstracts of 377 bulletins and 52 reports of the experiment stations in the United States, 176 publications of the Department of Agriculture, and numerous reports of foreign investigations. The total number of abstracts is 4,620, classified as follows: Chemistry, 230; botany, 177; fermentation and bacteriology, 49; zoology, 51; meteorology and climatology, 102; air, water, and soils, 183; fertilizers, 184; field crops, 344; horticulture, 463; forestry, 199; seeds and weeds, 73; diseases of plants, 371; entomology, 371; foods and nutrition, 257; animal production, 344; dairy farming and dairying, 208; veterinary science and practice, 670; technology, 27; agricultural engineering, 158; statistics and miscellaneous, 159.

This volume contains condensed accounts of the convention of the Association of Official Agricultural Chemists, 1902; International Conference on Plant Breeding and Hybridization, convention of the Association of American Agricultural Colleges and Experiment Stations, and the meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science as regards agricultural science; a description of the new buildings at the New Hampshire and Missouri agricultural colleges, and an article on Values in Science, by W. H. Jordan. The following topics are discussed in the editorials: Increased funds for station maintenance; education of the American farmer; Royal Society's catalogue of scientific papers; fiftieth anniversary of the first State experiment station; Prof. A. Petermann, founder of the experiment station system of Belgium; Jacob Richards Dodge, agricultural statistician; Virchow's service to agriculture, progress in plant breeding; Dr. Robert C. Kedzie, a pioneer in agricultural science; new yearbook of the Russian experiment stations; overworking among experiment station men; need of extending the scope of station operations; some factors in research work; P. P. Deherain, deceased; agricultural experimentation in the Philippine Islands; the agricultural appropriation act, 1903-4; the Department publications; the soil survey in 1903; school garden at the Department of Agriculture; need of experiments with horses; an index

catalogue for agricultural libraries; an index of scientific periodicals; memoir of the National Institute of Agriculture at Paris; progress of secondary education in agriculture; the exhibit of the land-grant colleges and agricultural experiment stations at St. Louis, and conclusion of Vol. XIV.

The largest undertaking connected with the Record has been the completion of the general index to the first twelve volumes. This work, which has been in progress for some two years, has proved far more time-consuming and laborious than could be anticipated. It covers the two parts of Experiment Station Bulletin No. 2, which contain the abstracts of the reports of the experiment stations for 1888, the first year after their organization under the Hatch Act, as well as Volumes I to XII of the Experiment Station Record. It therefore begins with the work of the experiment stations under the Hatch Act and covers the period down to the close of the century (the year 1900). The indexes to this work are contained in fourteen different volumes, many of them large and cumbersome to handle. In combining these indexes the entries have been systematized and extended, and every effort has been made to make the references complete under appropriate headings and easily found by means of cross references. In its completed form the index contains about 125,000 entries, and is undoubtedly the most extensive index to the literature of agricultural experimentation which has ever been issued.

Miscellaneous technical publications.-These included a Digest of Recent Experiments on Horse Feeding; Progress in Secondary Education in Agriculture; Some Practical Results of Experiment Station Work; Proceedings of the Fifteenth Annual Convention of the Association of American Agricultural Colleges and Experiment Stations; Proceedings of the Seventh Annual Meeting of the American Association of Farmers' Institute Workers; Organization Lists of the Agricultural Colleges and Experiment Stations in the United States; Statistics of the Land-grant Colleges and Agricultural Experiment Stations in the United States; and publications on nutrition and irrigation, noted on pages 68 and 76, respectively.

Farmers' bulletins. These included articles on Silos and Silage, Principles of Horse Feeding, and two numbers of Experiment Station Work.

Card index. Copy for 1,700 cards of the index of experiment station literature was prepared during the past year, and the number of index cards distributed reached 23,000.

AGRICULTURAL EXPERIMENT STATIONS IN ALASKA, HAWAII, AND PORTO RICO.

Agricultural experiment stations were regularly maintained during the past year, as heretofore, at Sitka and Kenai, and a new station was established at Copper Center, Alaska. The Hawaii Experiment Sta