Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 76.djvu/527

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THE DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE.
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Departments Bureaus
I. War 1. Corps of Engineers
 
II. Navy 2. Hydrographic Office
3. Naval Observatory
 
III. Interior 4. General Land Office
5. Geological Survey
6. Reclamation Service
 
IV. Agriculture 7. Weather Bureau
8. Bureau of Animal Industry
9. Bureau of Plant Industry
10. Forest Service
11. Bureau of Chemistry
12. Bureau of Soils
13. Bureau of Entomology
14. Biological Survey
15. Bureau of Statistics
16. Office of Experiment Stations
17. Office of Public Roads
 
V. Commerce and Labor 18. Bureau of Corporations
19. Census Bureau
20. Coast and Geodetic Survey
21. Bureau of Fisheries
22. Bureau of Standards
 
23. Smithsonian Institution

Half of the official bureaus (much more in effective strength) belong to the Department of Agriculture. This department was designed and is maintained expressly to increase and diffuse knowledge concerning the natural sources of power and prosperity; and it is significant that more than three quarters of the investigative work of the federal government has either grown up in or gone over to the youngest two departments of the federal organization, of which the last formed is essentially commercial.

The federal bureaus are supplemented by corresponding instrumentalities in most of the states, with which there is large and rapidly growing cooperation. The spirit of the work arises chiefly in, and is largely guided by, some score of voluntary associations, with an aggregate membership of several thousand, including most of the investigators for the state and federal agencies. On the whole, the state agencies are of the greater magnitude and the more largely devoted to applications, the federal agencies the more largely devoted to investigation; the latter seem to be growing the more rapidly to meet a strong demand for effective cooperation with states and associations. The most rapid growth is that of the voluntary associations, of which an increasing proportion are devoted to the application rather than to the increase of knowledge; while the growth of the investigative