in it, their progress so far is in the right direction. You have also the Agricultural Bureau, in the service of which reports embodying many of the facts and observations required are already made, or might be without any additional expense. Many of the data which these two offices seek to obtain stand somewhat in the relation of cause and effect to each other—as, for instance, a dry season and bad crops. Your fields have the same area and soil this year that they had last. Why is not their yield the same? Simply because the seasons were different Do you mean to say that amid all the mind, means, and appliances of the age, the relations between the weather and the crops are past finding out? If I could, with just such a system of researches for the sea, sit down in my office and tell the navigator how he would find the wind, at any season of the year, in any part of the ocean through which he wished to sail, am I promising too much when I tell you, that by the plan I now propose the relation between the weather and the crops is as capable of scientific development as were the relations between sea-voyages and the winds twenty-five years ago?
"The new system of observations may be so arranged that the two offices may co-operate, each giving the other what it lacks to make its own observations and data complete. . . .
"I have drawn my illustrations chiefly from cotton. But the grain-growers have a larger interest at stake in this matter than even the cotton-planters; and so are all who are engaged in the cultivation of staples, of whatever kind, in any part of the world. Proper co-operation having been established between the Signal Office and Agricultural Bureau at Washington, let us see what else is required to carry the plan into effect in this country. . . .
"I believe the Agricultural Bureau has already in its employ agents in the various States to collect agricultural information. Its organization for receiving monthly or
