Evening star., 1924-07-03
j. S. HAS B|GPART
IN PUBLIC TRAINING
N. E. A. Speakers Tell of Ex.
tenSive Educational Work
of Departments.

What various government depart
ments and bureaus are achieving of
educational value to the country and
posterity was described to the Educa-
tional Press Association of America
by prominent speakers last night at
the Cosmos Club.
The activities of the Department of
Agriculture, the bureau of standards.
the Library of Congress and the
Smithsonian Institution were partic-
ularly stressed by such speakers as
c. w. Warburton, DR.. George X. Bur-
CESS. Appleton P. c. Griffin and DR.. J.
Walter Fewkes.
The Department of Agriculture
alone keeps a staff of 1900 men and
women busy and spends $4,000, 900 a
year educating farm families by
system, declared Mr.. Warburton. di-
rector of work. The department, he
added, might truthfully be classed as
"a great agricultural university"
Its work" he continued, follows,
as does the modern university, three
main lines of research - resident,
teaching and extension. This re-
search work is carried on through
eleven bureaus, covering a wide
range of experiments and studies,
try, the weather, soils, chemistry,
entomology, biological survey, fores-
try, roads, agricultural economy and
home economies"
Work in Many Countries.
This work, the speaker asserted, is
carried on in laboratories and sta
tions in various parts of the United
States, in Alaska and Hawaii, and
even in foreign countries, the results
benig made available to the farmers
and the country generally through
the publication of many pamphlets
both technical and popular.
DR.. Burgess, director of the bureau
of standards, explained how his de-
partment is conducting investiga-
nishing the country with publications
which have come to be accepted as
authoritative reference and text
books all over the world. DR.. Bur-
CESS bureau deals largely with the
questions affecting physical science.
The talk by Mr.. Griffin, chief as
sistant librarian of the Library of
Congress, on the government great
repository for books, was of especial
interest to the delegates. He pointed
out that the National Capital has no
great university collection compar-
able to the libraries of Harvard,
Princeton, Yale, Brown or Columbia.
The Library of Congress, however, he
said, with its 100000 volumes, takes
the place of those great reservoirs of
research.
The value of the Library Of Con-
gress as a repository of accurate and
complete information, Mr.. Griffin con-
tinued, is attested by the fact that
it is daily visited by authors of high
repute as producers of Informative
literature, professors and instructors
in higher institutions of learning,
graduate candidates for higher de-
SreeS and others, of diScrimina ton,
seeking information on varied sub
jects.
Activities Described.
Mr.. Griffin described the activities
of the different branches of the
library. The photographed section,
he said, is constantly engaged in the
preparation Of bibliographies and
reference lists. He described how
the public affairs information service
keeps interested persons constantly
informed as to the availability of
records, and the careful indexing sys-
tenn which considerably simplifies
locating books or magazines desired
by callers.
DR.. Fewkes. who is chief of the
bureau of American ethnology of the
Smithsonian Institution, declared
that the institution furnishes mate
rial to colleges, universities and SIM
liar places of learning. which they
can adapt for educational purposes.
somewhat the same relationship
exists between the Smithsonian insti-
tuition and public education" he said,
that we find between the discoverer
of scientific laws and the inventor
who practically applies them"