Such digests may or may not be intelligently made, and, even under the
most favorable circumstances, will hardly serve any other purpose than
helping to the reference to the original articles, and this could
undoubtedly be done more satisfactorily to the stations and to the
people at large by general and classified indices to all the State
documents, made as full as possible and issued at stated intervals.
Only a small proportion of the bulletins have been so far noticed by
digest in this record, with no particular rule, so far as I can see,
in the selection. In point of fact, those will be most apt to be
noticed whose authors can find time to themselves send or make for the
purpose their own abstracts. This is, perhaps, inevitable under
present arrangements. Complete and satisfactory digests of all, if
intelligent and critical, imply a far greater force than is at present
at Prof. Atwater's command.
Under these circumstances, it would seem wiser to devote all the
energies of the bureau to digests of the similar literature of other
countries, which would be of immense advantage to our people and to
the different station workers. Judging from the recommendations and
resolutions of the general association, this is the view very
generally held, but except in chemistry and special industries like
that of beet sugar, very little of that kind of work has yet been
attempted.
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