(Witness: Hill.)

Mr. SAMUEL. Suppose we take up each report, the Secretary's report first.

Mr. HILL. Very well. The first report is that of the Secretary himself, which is published as part 1 of the annual report of the Department. It is a document by itself, of which the statute provides for 5,000 copies. We reprint that in different forms because it is not nearly enough for us. We reprint that in an edition of 50,000 copies as a special report of the Secretary's office.

Mr. FLOOD. What is done with the report?

Mr. HILL. It goes mainly and very largely to the crop correspondents-about 40,000 to the crop correspondents of the Bureau of Sta tistics.

Mr. FLOOD. What disposition do you make of the 5,000 copiesthe first edition?

Mr. HILL. First of all they go to colleges and stations, and a certain number go to representatives of the Weather Bureau and representatives of the Bureau of Animal Industry and several other large bureaus. The special county correspondents get them--that is, about 2,800-and it takes about 2,000 to satisfy the others. It is gone as soon as it is issued.

Mr. FLOOD. Under existing law you do not think enough copies of the Secretary's report are printed?

Mr. HILL. We have hard work to supply the demand for the Secretary's report. It is reprinted in the Yearbook under a provision of law which says that the Yearbook of the Department shall contain a succinct account of the operations of the Department for the year, and the most succinct account of the general operations of the Department that we can find is the Secretary's annual report, and it is printed in the Yearbook.

Mr. SAMUEL. Then it is printed twice?

Mr. HILL. It is printed three times. So far as the total number of Yearbooks at our disposal is concerned, that 500,000 copies that were provided by law-somewhat reduced by this recent law permitting them to be published in successive editions of that number we only get 30,000, no more than we got eighteen or nineten years ago, when I first came in. We do not get enough, and we sometimes have to send round a begging letter to the different Members of Congress and Senators asking them, if they are not going to use them, if they will let us have some of their yearly quota for our use.

Mr. SAMUEL. About how many do you estimate will be required? Mr. HILL. Fifty thousand will be needed for the Department use. We employ a very large number of persons in gratuitous work. Professor Moore has more than 3,000-about 4,000-voluntary observers. These men render a great deal of useful service during the year, and they can not understand when they write to us for a Yearbook why it is we say to them that they should apply to their Member of Congress. It is the same way with the crop correspondents of the Bureau of Statistics, who have also a number of men who render a good deal of very tangible service by active cooperation with the Department. Really there is not a bureau that has not several hundred, and there are several thousand required in the Bureau of Statistics. Their active correspondents for special service get information for the Department, sometimes requiring them to get a

(Witnesses: Hill, Zappone.)

buggy and drive around for half a day, and perhaps they will take with them one of our own men and spend a couple of days with him working on a special line of inquiry. We feel that the least we can do for that man is to send him one of the Yearbooks of the Department, which is our biggest and best book, but we do not have enough to satisfy that class of people.

Mr. SAMUEL. The annual report of the Secretary is a statutory report?

Mr. HILL. Yes, sir.

Mr. SAMUEL. By publishing that in the Yearbook do you think it is necessary to publish it separately too?

Mr. HILL. Well, yes; you see we don't send them to the same people. The people who get the Yearbook do not get the annual report. We send the annual report to a large number of people who never see the Yearbook at all. The Bureau of Statistics really has on its list over 250,000 correspondents, and we do not begin to satisfy anywhere near all of them.

Mr. ZAPPONE. May I make a remark here? Mr. Hill, is not the type kept set up of the Secretary's annual report so that it can be included in the Yearbook, and therefore there is really no additional cost for that part of the work?

Mr. HILL. Yes, sir.

Mr. SAMUEL. Of course, it being a statutory provision we have nothing to say in regard to the matter; but it occurred to me that if they were going to print it in the Yearbook we could send the Yearbook to those getting the report, and they would have a much more valuable book.

Mr. ZAPPONE. Is not the annual report a requirement of law; does it not have to be submitted to the President, and in the same form in which the various reports of the other Cabinet officials are submitted?

Mr. HILL. We report directly to the President, and it forms usually part of the President's message and of the Messages and Papers.

Mr. ZAPPONE. It is a very small volume, you will notice. I have a copy in my hand.

Mr. SAMUEL. How many copies of the first annual report of the Secretary are issued?

Mr. HILL. Five thousand statutorily-the same as of all Cabinet officers.

Mr. SAMUEL. I notice by this printed list that there were 4,854. Mr. FLOOD. How do you get the other edition of 50,000?

Mr. HILL. We publish that as a special report of the Secretary's office.

Mr. FLOOD. Who is that distributed to?

Mr. HILL. To the crop correspondents entirely and to other people who do not get the Yearbook, as a rule.

Mr. SAMUEL. How many crop correspondents do you have?
Mr. HILL. Over 250,000, I think.

Mr. SAMUEL. Are they supposed to receive a copy of that report? Mr. HILL. They are supposed to receive copies of our publications. I can not say of that report, because we haven't enough of them to give them each a copy; but we try to pay them for their services by accommodating them with publications.

(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.