the Mississippi, the Missouri, and the Red River valleys. Here was a land of abundant rainfall and an almost unparalleled richness of soil that offered untold wealth to those who should be the first to tap its boundless resources; and here came the bonanza farmer. With a picturesqueness of operation perhaps never again to be equalled, with a fine disregard of the needs of the soil and of the rights of the coming generations, he yearly sowed and reaped his thousands of acres of wheat, marketing the product and, incidentally, with every crop reducing the productivity of the soil. And what the bonanza farmer did on a large scale thousands of homesteaders did on a smaller scale, until even the well-nigh inexhaustible wealth of those fertile alluvial soils shrank so from year to year that both the bonanza farmer and the homesteader were brought face to face with the problem of decreasing yields due to lessened soil fertility.

In the meantime there had grown up, in the form of the United States Department of Agriculture, an institution destined to solve the problem which confronted the wheat farmer. In the first year of the Civil War Congress passed an act establishing this department for the purpose of gathering by research a body of knowledge concerning soil, crops, live stock, farm management, and general rural economy. During the same session of Congress the law was enacted which established a college of agriculture in

every State, thus inaugurating our agricultural educational service. This same Congress passed also the Homestead Law dividing all the public lands then remaining on the family farm basis, practically giving them to the people and thus inaugurating the plan of the common farm throughout the country. Thus President Lincoln signed the law providing for family farms, the laws under which the Nation and the States, by research and vocational education, secure the information necessary to enable the millions of farmers to make their farming profitable.

The Department of Agriculture grew rather slowly until the end of the Nineteenth century. During the last two decades, however, it has grown from an institution with a few hundred workers to a great department, with 12,000 or 15,000 employees. It is now charged by Congress with the expenditure of nearly $20,000,000, about onethird of which is devoted to agricultural research.

This Department employs experts in all lines of agricultural investigation and experimentation, the results of whose labors swell the sum total of scientific agricultural knowledge and aid every farmer in solving his numerous and perplexing individual problems. Among this great body of public workers are soil experts, whose efforts are directed toward answering the great questions pertaining to soil management, fertility and conservation; live stock experts, who

VOL. X-23

AGRICULTURE.

NATIONAL FORESTS IN THE UNITED STATES, ALASKA AND PORTO RICO.

study the breeding, feeding, and management of all classes of live stock; entomologists and plant pathologists, who devise means of combating insect pests and the fungous and bacterial diseases of plants; statisticians, who, by the accumulation of data relative to the cost of producing farm products, have helped to systematize the farm business; drainage, irrigation, and roads experts; and, in addition, hundreds of men who spread this knowledge among the people and (by lectures, demonstration farms, and other means) assist them to apply it to their daily tasks. Congress has charged this Department also with the management of 190,000,000 acres of forests. This is equal to one-twelfth the area of the United States-to the combined areas of the States of Iowa, Missouri, Kansas, Nebraska, and Illinois. The map appended hereto shows the National forest areas. Thus the Forest Service division of this great Department not only helps to organize the science of forestry, but also protects existing forests against deforestization and replants cut-over lands. It has charge, moreover, of the stupendous business of harvesting, under lease, of vast quantities of timber.

The Bureau of Animal Industry of the Department of Agriculture not only studies diseases and the feeding and breeding of animals, but has charge of great campaigns aiming to eradicate disease. Thus, it spent nearly half a million dollars some

years ago in successfully eradicating the foot-and-mouth-disease that had entered this country from Europe. Had this disease not been vigorously stamped out, it would have caused a loss of live stock worth many millions of dollars. This Bureau is now carrying on a successful campaign to the very important end of ridding the great western open range country of the skin diseases of sheep and cattle known as scabies. It has charge, too, of a mighty battle with the cattle tick, which causes Texan fever in the cattle of the Southern States. The following map shows the present infested area and that originally infested from which the tick has been eradicated. This Bureau is also coöperating with the States in discovering ways of eradicating tuberculosis among cattle so that losses in the cattle business may be lessened and the danger of infection to people using dairy products may be reduced.

In 1887 Congress, approving of the research work of the United States Department of Agriculture, appropriated $750,000 annually to the States to be expended in agricultural research, giving every State $15,000 and causing every State and Territory to establish an experiment station. To this amount most of the States have added fairly liberal appropriations of their own. The stations were generally established near the State colleges of agriculture and have proved of enormous importance in working out the facts of agricultural science

and the principles underlying agricultural practice. They have greatly aided also in giving scientific instruction and assistance to the agricultural colleges beside which they are located.

At present, in its National and State departments of agriculture and in its State experiment stations, this country is expending about $10,000,000 annually in agricultural research. The $75,000,000 spent in this country on agricultural investigations and the machinery invented for agricultural use, combined with the genius of the farmers themselves, have resulted in reorganizing agricultural practice.

Until very recently the people received this new knowledge slowly and with suspicion. To change the working plans of an entire class of people is necessarily a work of time, and for years the practical farmer looked with disfavor and distrust upon the "book farmer." When, however, decreasing yields rendered his profits smaller every year, something had to be done. In his extremity he turned for help to the "book farmer," the agricultural scientist, and these two classes learned to respect each other's special knowledge.

The consequent coöperation between farmer and scientist has wrought a revolution in farm practice and transformed the haphazard, unsystematic, one-crop agriculture of earlier days into the scientific business farming of to-day farming in which farms are planned and managed so that the effi

ciency of labor may be increased, in which crops are rotated so that soil fertility may be conserved, in which expenses are carefully recorded so that actual loss or gain in the farming business may be accurately known.

During the past decade or two a movement has been organized to improve the varieties of plants and animals used on the farm so as to secure varieties and breeds with such heredity as will greatly increase products and net profits. Thus the breeders of wheat and other grains are successfully seeking for that occasional plant (perhaps one in ten thousand) which, when multiplied into a variety, will add a few bushels to the yield per acre. The apple growers are planting tens of thousands of seeds so that the occasional plant may be found which, when its cuttings are grown into trees, will make an apple of better quality, larger in yield, and with all other desirable characteristics of this king of fruit. Peter Gideon's notable work in Minnesota in producing the Wealthy apple, with sufficient hardiness to extend the northern zone of the apple for probably a hundred miles, is a good illustration of achievement along this line.

The breeders of animals, in like manner, are seeking the occasional potent animal which, when closely inbred, will produce a strain of the breed, or a new breed, more valuable than the breed or breeds from which he sprang. Thus, during the last half century the American Poland-China