"Of making many books there is no end," and of the fashioning of bulletins there is no limit, and no precedent. There are kinds to suit all tastes, and and no tastes. The most entertaining are the bulletins of promise. Like promissory notes, they are easy to make. One would think that the millenium of agriculture were sure to come within a twelvemonth. Cattle feeding, forage plants, chemistry of everything in the soil and above it, science of the winds and rain, diseases of plants, diseases of animals, kinds of vegetables and fruits, methods of cultivating everything, science of insects and birds, and a score of other definite and simple problems are to receive attention. This is one way of saying, "we are ready for anything." Promissory bulletins, like the first chapters of books, are easy to write. Somehow one warms up to his subject at an amazing rate when he grasps his pen and stabs it into a new field. Promises roll off in ink drops, and it is hard to close the chapter.

Akin to these bulletins are the explanatory ones. They assume the reader to be a child and then proceed to explain with the most painstaking minuteness. It is all made so clear that one wonders why he needs to know it - and perhaps he (Joes not need to know it.

Then comes the bulletin with a report of progress - a list of trees and shrubs and vegetables which will drive a catalogue maker to shame. A useful bulletin this, for it informs people what the station owns, and that is information which we all want. Now and then we get the big bulletin, groaning under a load of a couple hundred pages. Capital volume this for the top shelf of a closet cupboard, where, like the Raven, it sits "evermore".

The statistical bulletin is common. It stares at you with great rows and columns of figures, and you sink back into your chair completely squelched. Figures never lie - so they say - and you are appalled at the amount of truth which these bulletins must contain. But in four cases out of five you cannot find the truth, for the phenomenal author has not had the time to give you any conclusions or summaries. There are no short cuts. And the best you can do is to carefully light your pipe with the leaves, one by one, and hope to inhale some of the ponderous facts. Nothing so impressess one with the inexhaustible resources of the human mind, as this ability, which some people possess, to go deliberately into the field and count the number of peas in a thousand pods, to compute how many flowers there must be in a row of pumpkins, to weigh a hundred turnips, and then to go home and put down the figures ! What do the figures teach ? Why that, sir, is no part of the matter. It is enough to have the figures.

There are tardy bulletins. Along in November comes a bulletin, dated last January or May. It is necessarily apologetic. It covers the emptiness of the intervening months. This is the quintessence of convenience, this dating back of bulletins. It meets the requirements of the law - in a measure - and enables the winter to take a long and deliberate retrospect of months of idleness. Or, perchance, the writer is free to admit that he has no experiment to report, but he falls back* upon that convenient and well-saddled see-saw, "a great many applications have been made for this information," "this bulletin is written in answer to questions from numerous applicants," etc., etc. But we should not hold the bulletin writer to too strict an account in this connection, for perhaps half our rural books are written - or are said to be - in response to just such demands upon the noted author's time and inexhaustible knowledge.

Then there is the grandiose bulletin, which Mi-cawber would have delighted to read. "And now in conclusion," runs a Louisiana cotton bulletin, "permit me to say that no other crop has within it so much promise and potency as that which we of the South have so long deified as King Cotton. It clothes the world with the cheapest and best garments ; it furnishes the lard for our kitchen, the oil for our salad, the butter for our bread, the soap for our toilet and the candles for our bed-room. It feeds our Jersey cow, it fertilizes our garden and field crops. It paints our houses, dyes our hosiery and makes our ointments. It furnishes us with paper, delicate enough to receive the sweetest strains of whispered love, or strong enough for the wheels of the ponderous locomotive. It gives us thread as fine as the spider's silken web, or strong enough to lash the navies of the world together. Such, now, is this wonderful plant, and who can deny the magnificent possibilities of its future?" "Cotton is emphatically the child of the sun and flourishes only in warm latitudes. Its heliotropic tendencies are even more marked than the poetical sunflower.

Its leaves receive the first glow of morning light, and following the king of day, dismiss it at eve in the west with dewy regrets".

Whoop! Up we go in a flurry of smoke and glory!

And this cotton bulletin continues; "Compost, compost is the word. The modern olympus is a compost heap and the god enthroned on it is called Jupiter Ammoniac".

Shades of Homer! Now let us substitute this recent mythology for the old, in that august council of the goods before the second battle: -

Now morn in saffron robes bad shed her light, O'er all the earth, when Jupiter Ammoniac, Summoned the Gods to council on the heights, Of the many peaked Manure-pile.

R. T. Choke.