proceedings: botanical society 167 



prairie chickens, the latter in times past having been shot from the 

 speaker's porch. The prothonotary warbler, once common, appears 

 to have gone northward. New birds now found at Burlington have 

 come from the west, such as western meadowlark and red-shafted 

 flicker. Other newcomers are the tufted tit and Carolina wren. Many 

 of these changes are due to human agencies, some are unexplainable. 

 Dr. Bartsch's paper was discussed by Messrs. Hay, McAtee, Wilcox, 

 Goldman, Jackson, and others. 



M. W. Lyon, Jr., Recording Secretary. 



THE BOTANICAL SOCIETY OF WASHINGTON 



The 117th regular meeting of the Society was held in the Assembly 

 Hall of the Cosmos Club at 8 p.m., January 2, 1917, President T. H. 

 Kearney presiding. Mr. C. W. Warburton was elected to member- 

 ship. 



Under Brief Notes and Reviews of Literature, Mr. W. T. Swingle 

 called attention to a recent trip by Prof. E. D. Merrill of the Phil- 

 ippine Bureau of Science, to the vicinity of Canton, China, where 

 3000 botanical specimens were secured. 



The regular program was devoted to* the subject of Plant Introduc- 

 tion under which the following papers were presented: 



The need of more foreign agricultural exploration. (Illustrated) : 

 David Fairchild. Attention was called to the need of more foreign 

 agricultural exploration and to the fact that only a comparatively 

 small amount of money had been expended in such work. The 

 amount had seldom, if ever, exceeded ,$18,000 in any one year, 

 and for the most part the expense had been much lower. The most 

 successful type of agricultural exploration has been carried on by men 

 who are interested in particular lines of agricultural work. Among 

 those who have been called into the exploration work temporarily are 

 Messrs. Kearney, Carleton, Hansen, Swingle, Cook, Collins, Oliver, 

 Aaronsohn, Meyer, Rolfs, Bessey, Knapp, Mason, Scofield, Shamel, 

 Dorsett, Popenoe, Young, Lake, Bolley, Shear, Tracy, and Fairchild. 

 Attention was also called to the need of studying the methods of agri- 

 cultural production in foreign countries, to some of the more important 

 recent introductions, and to the difficulty in getting people to adopt 

 new foods. 



The wild relatives of our crop plants; their value in breeding; how to 

 secure them. (Illustrated) : Walter T. Swingle. The importance 

 of the wild relatives of our cultivated plants in effective breeding for 

 such desirable qualities as hardiness, earliness or lateness of blooming 

 or of ripening, disease resistance, extra vigor, etc. was discussed. Fre- 

 quently these wild relatives were found to be inconspicuous plants 

 quite unlike the cultivated forms in appearance and were often native 

 in remote localities. The Australian desert Kumquat, Eremocitrus 

 glauca, for example, was originally described under the genus Triphasia 

 and afterwards transferred to the genus Atalantia. In neither of these 



