INCORPORATION OF THE BUREAU OF SOILS
Secretary Jardine gave as an excuse for putting a small fragment of the Bureau of Chemistry with the whole Bureau of Soils the following pertinent reason: "The Bureau of Soils itself needs to be revitalized. Everybody in this country that is working with soils realizes that." Most truly said. But why does he want to put the Bureau of Soils into the Bureau of Chemistry to be revitalized, while he takes out of the Bureau of Chemistry a food administration which is needing revitalizing more than the Burean of Soils ever did? The Secretary also has made another discovery which is most interesting. He states: "Then in the Bureau of Chemistry we also have questions that are closely related to soils. Thirty years ago it was not so." This statement would be interesting to Liebig and the founders of the Rothamsted Station in England, Lawes and Gilbert, a hundred years ago; to the late Professor Hilgard, who made soils his specialty during his whole lifetime, and to Johnson, Hopkins, Snyder, and Goessmann in this country, Hall in England, Boussingault in France, and to those other chemists, too numerous to mention, who have for one hundred and fifty years regarded soils a peculiarly appropriate subject for chemical investigation. One of the great faults of bureaucracy is to, claim long-known truths as its own discoveries. Before the Bureau of Soils was ever thought of, the Bureau of Chemistry had developed a scientific investigation of soils on a strictly practical plan. It had brought samples of soils from all the different states and from the Rothamsted Station in England. These soils had been carefully analyzed by the most approved methods, had been placed in pots carried on railways. It had built a house to put them under cover when it rained or when it froze. It had carried on elaborate cultivations of the kinds of crops these soils produced under a standard environment of moisture, temperature and sunlight. When the Bureau of Soils was organized the first thing it did was to demand the entire cessation of scientific soil investigation by the Bureau of Chemistry. The Secretary, at the instigation of the Bureau of Soils, ordered the soils thus accumulated to be thrown out, the railway demolished and the building in which the soils were kept, razed. Data accumulated under several years of investigations were denied publication by the Bureau of Soils. They still lie in the celebrated morgue of the Department of Agriculture, mute witnesses of violence, with many others of their like, waiting for Gabriel's trump. Surely the Bureau of Soils needs a "revitalization." It needs more a second birth!
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