(Witness: Hill.)

Mr. FLOOD. How are the 470,000 Yearbooks distributed?

Mr. HILL. Entirely through the folding rooms of the House and the Senate on orders of Representatives and Senators.

Mr. FLOOD. Do you mean that Senators and Representatives get the whole 470,000?

Mr. HILL. Yes, sir; each Senator and Member getting about a thousand copies.

Mr. DAVEY. I think we received 952 copies last year as our quota. Mr. SAMUEL. You made a statement a while ago that there were 150,000 or 160,000 of these Yearbooks left over.

Mr. HILL. That is my recollection of the report made to the Committee on Printing. The Committee on Printing investigated this matter very thoroughly last year with a view to reducing the cost of printing, and they have a very full statement as to the accumulation of books; but my recollection is that their report showed that twelve months after an issue of any particular Yearbook there were sometimes 150,000 or 160,000 copies still on hand.

Mr. FLOOD. Which means that the Members did not send them out promptly?

Mr. HILL. That is all it means. My suggestion has been that Members who do not use their reports up to a certain time should return half of them to the general fund to be redistributed through the Department.

Mr. SAMUEL. Then it is your opinion that the Department should have at least 50,000?

Mr. HILL. Yes, sir. We used to get 10 per cent when the edition was 300,000, or 30,000. We still get 30,000, though the edition is increased to half a million.

Mr. CANDLER. What was the recommendation of the Committee on Printing as to the manner in which they shall be printed?

Mr. HILL. They provide that there shall now be printed editions of 50,000 or 100,000, and that new editions shall be called for as the numbers desired exceed the supply. When it runs down to fifteen or twenty thousand copies, the Public Printer, on advice of the Committee on Printing, will then print another edition.

Mr. FLOOD. How will you be able to distribute them?

Mr. HILL. There are some Members who do not use them at all; that is the idea.

Mr. FLOOD. How would you distribute them among the Members? Some of the Members want their full quota while others might not want them. If you only printed them in editions of 50,000, how would you distribute them?

Mr. HILL. I am not speaking by the card because I was not responsible for that thing, but I am speaking as I recollect the recommendations of the committee. They do not interfere with the Members' quota, consequently if you draw your quota and you want your quota full, you will get it full, but exhaust that edition that much sooner. They do not reduce the quota in proportion to the edition. This is the first time, I understand, that the law has been enforced.

Mr. FLOOD. How many copies of the annual report of the Weather Bureau are printed?

Mr. HILL. I think there are 4,000.

(Witnesses: Hill, Moore.)

Professor MOORE. Four thousand, 1,000 going to the Bureau, 2,000 to the House, and 1,000 to the Senate. If you will allow me to interject a remark there, I would say that I believe the number is entirely too large. I do not think Members of Congress use those reports very generally, because they are rather technical and only a few people can use them; but I think the number, without injury to anyone, could be reduced, probably one-half, easily. Five hundred copies would be an abundance for us. At present many of the reports are sent to people who do not use them. They are used principally by a library, an academy of sciences, or some student of therapeutics of the air, like a physician who studies the effects of climate on disease. Mr. HILL. Your report is technical, while ours is mainly popular. Professor MOORE. I should think a much smaller edition would do, if put at the disposal of the Weather Bureau, with the understanding that they will honor all requests of Members of Congress or Senators. Mr. SAMUEL. What sized edition would you suggest?

Professor MOORE. I should estimate that 2,000 copies would be an abundance for all purposes.

Mr. SAMUEL. How many copies of the annual report of the Bureau of Animal Industry do you issue?

Mr. HILL. Thirty thousand; 9,000 to the Department and 21,000 divided between the Senate and the House.

Mr. SAMUEL. Is that sufficient, or too many?

Mr. HILL. We do not get too many, I can assure you of that.

Mr. SAMUEL. You get 9,000?

Mr. HILL. Yes. Now, as to the distribution by Senators and Representatives, I could not speak positively, because I do not remember just what the report of the Committee on Printing shows on that. Mr. SAMUEL. Is that 9,000 sufficient for your use?

Mr. HILL. I think that is about right.

Professor MOORE. May I interject another remark there in regard to the 4.000 copies of the Weather Bureau report? That number is determined by law. It is statutory.

Mr. SAMUEL. The usual statutory provision. How about the annual report of the Bureau of Soils?

Mr. HILL. We have just made quite a difference in regard to that. That is a peculiar report. For each separate soil survey made 1,000 copies go to the Department, 2.000 copies to the Member of Congress in whose district or districts the survey is located, and 500 copies to each one of the Senators of the State in which the survey is made. Those go out as advanced sheets before the report is bound. Of course that number is more or less floating, because sometimes a survey will affect two districts and sometimes but one. That question came up in the State of Washington, as they have three Members from that State at large and no particular districts, but I do not know how the Public Printer finally decided to print them, although I think he gave them 2.000 apiece. But there was an appropriation for binding these at the end of the year in two volumes the text in one volume and the maps in a case-and I think it was 6.000 or 8,000.

Mr. SAMUEL. This report shows 6,354.

Mr. HILL. Well, this year we have only asked for 1,000 copies of the bound report, the greater demand being for the surveys. The

(Witness: Hill.)

Member of Congress in whose district the survey is made gets a good many demands for the surveys, but they do not care about a survey made in Texas or Maine or in other States. They want the survey that affects them, and the consequence is that we have found it possible to curtail the number issued in bound form. There were a great many of those left over in the hands of the folding rooms of the Senate and House, but not so many with us, because we have a good many demands from scientific institutions, educational institutions, and libraries, which absorb a good many.

Mr. SAMUEL. How many copies of the annual report of the sugarbeet industry do you issue?

Mr. HILL. I can not remember just now without reference to my list.

Mr. FLOOD. I suppose the demand for that is simply local.

Mr. HILL. That is an instance of the waste owing to the provision of law, and we need some special legislation to avoid that. When a publication is issued with a proviso that so many shall go to the Senate and so many to the House they are divided equally, I understand, between Senators and Representatives. With a report like that upon the sugar-beet industry it is a glaring absurdity, because a man who is not in a sugar-beet district does not want a copy any more than a wagon needs a fifth wheel, while those men who are in the sugar-beet belt do not get as many as they want. That should be changed around. We get tremendously urgent appeals from the Representatives in the sugar-beet belt for extra copies, which we have not got, and at the same time we know that many of the Members are getting them who really do not need them; but that is something which we can not control.

Mr. SAMUEL. Now, how is it as to the report on the experiment stations?

Mr. HILL. I think that is 8,000: maybe more than that, but I do not remember.

Mr. FLOOD. You mean that those are the different agricultural experiment stations?

Mr. HILL. No; it is a report of the chief of experiment stations, the bureau of our Department, which is the channel of communication or intercourse or co-relation of work between the Department of Agriculture and the various stations in the several States.

Mr. FLOOD. The State stations.

Mr. HILL. Under the Hatch Act there is a co-relation established; there is a bond, and this is the bureau through which that bond is operated. They issue an annual report, which includes a review of the station work of the year.

Mr. FLOOD. But the Department has various experiment stations,

has it not?

Mr. HILL. The stations at Hawaii and Alaska and Porto Rico are placed under the immediate control of the Secretary of Agriculture. Mr. FLOOD. But you have experiment stations for cattle and horses and tobacco and other things.

Mr. HILL. In the different bureaus; but we do not call them agricultural experiment stations in the same sense that we do the State experiment stations.

(Witness: Hill.)

Mr. FLOOD. To whom do the gentlemen in charge of these stations make reports?

Mr. HILL. To the chief of the bureau having the matter in charge. We have an experiment station at Tennallytown that reports to the Bureau of Animal Industry.

Mr. FLOOD. Where do we get the reports?

Mr. HILL. In the reports of the Bureau of Animal Industry. And there may be some tobacco experiments which you will get in the report of the Bureau of Plant Industry, and some of them in the report of the Bureau of Soils. There is a lot of that work done in both bureaus, but these are not what we call regular experiment stations.

Mr. SAMUEL. As to the farmers' bulletins; how many of those?

Mr. HILL. I think we issue in the neighborhood of six to seven millions of the farmers' bulletins. We issue all that we have money to pay for, and we have calls for a great many more than we issue. Mr. DAVIS. What becomes of those not distributed or not called for?

Mr. HILL. There are very few not called for.

Mr. DAVIS. Are they transferred to others; is that the idea? Mr. HILL. Transferred to others. We used to carry over as many as 2.500.000 copies from one year to another, and the following year we added them to the estimated number that we were going to print that year, and thus had a larger proportion to give to Menibers. In that way we were giving the Members a quota of about 15,000. Congress was actually providing for about 10.000 and we were using the overlap. Two years ago the transfers from city Members to Members representing rural districts became so numerous that our overlap was reduced from 2,500,000 to 1,500,000, and we ought to have reduced the quota 2,000, but the Secretary hated to do that, so we only reduced it 1,000. Last year they cleaned us out so that we got down to hardpan, and this year the quota is reduced to about 10.000. which is about what the money will pay for. The overlap was insignificant and did not cut any figure.

Mr. DAVEY. If the quota is not used during the year, is it taken away?

Mr. HILL. There is a provision of law that gives you eleven months only. Four-fifths of the Farmers' Bulletins by law are reserved for use of Senators and Representatives, with the proviso that on the 31st of May any undistributed quota shall go back to the Department.

Mr. SAMUEL. What is the quota of each Member; do you know? Mr. HILL. This year it is 10,000 for each Member and each Senator. Mr. SAMUEL. Crop Correspondence, Bureau of Statistics. How many are there of those?

Mr. HILL. There is no special annual report of the Bureau of Statistics beyond the report that he makes to the Secretary. Mr. SAMUEL. It is not published separately?

Mr. HILL. No.

Mr. CANDLER. Referring again to the Farmers' Bulletins, do you believe that there are enough of those printed, or should there be an additional amount?

Mr. HILL. I do not think that there are enough of those printed. It has the largest amount of information and the most widely distrib

(Witnesses: Hill, Zappone.)

uted in proportion to the cost of anything that we publish. The cost of the Farmers' Bulletins is a fraction over a cent and a half apiece, and they are published in the cheapest form that we can use consistent with propriety. We put no cover on them, and we print them on a paper that will permit of running them through a very fast press. We do not put expensive illustrations in them, and we keep them down to a maximum of 48 pages. We try to run them about 32 pages on the average. Each one takes up some one particular subject, with information on that subject only. The result is that there is no waste, as there is where you publish a book upon a large number of subjects. There is, say, a very important article on rice in that book, and a man writes for that particular article. He will get the article on rice, but he will also get 70 or 80 or 100 pages of matter that he does not care for. With the Farmers' Bulletins it is different. A man writes to us saying that he wants something about the apple, and he gets information upon the apple and nothing but the apple. There is no superfluous matter. He may write to us that he wants something about the diseases of potatoes, and he gets that and nothing else. Each subject is segregated in a separate bulletin. We now have over 200 of them from which to select.

Mr. SAMUEL. If 6,000,000 or 7,000,000 are not enough, what would you estimate should be published?

Mr. HILL. We did not have too many for Members when we gave them 15,000 apiece, instead of 10,000, and that would necessitate an increase of about 50 per cent, or an increase to nine or ten million. Mr. CANDLER. And the demand is really growing all the time? Mr. HILL. Yes, sir. And you can readily understand that that is a class of publication that we have to give to correspondents who do work for us freely. Then there is another class of demand that is growing wonderfully for Farmers' Bulletins, and that is from the educational institutions, normal schools and high schools. They want them in quantities-that is, they will want 25, say, for a class. It seems like nothing to give 25 copies, at a cost of 40 cents, to those who are studying this subject, but when you get demands from educational institutions all over the United States it makes a very large draft.

Mr. ZAPPONE. When these publications are used as text-books by educational institutions, does not the law provide that they shall be purchased and paid for by those institutions?

Mr. HILL. The Public Printer has always been authorized to sell a number not exceeding 250, but the law provides that he shall receive the order therefor with the cash before it goes to press, and that is the difficulty.

Mr. CANDLER. Then you would recommend that this edition of Farmers' Bulletins be increased at least 50 per cent?

Mr. HILL. Yes; to 9,000,000 or 10,000,000.

Mr. ZAPPONE. May I read the recommendation of the Secretary in his annual report in that connection? It says:

The total number of copies of Farmers' Bulletins issued during the fiscal year 1906 was 6,568,000. The demand for Farmers' Bulletins by Senators and Representatives, who, under the law, are entitled to 80 per cent of the whole number printed, has been so much larger than usual that practically none were left to carry over to the present fiscal year