IV inter Meeting. 323 



plant to the position of one of our most important .garden vegetables. 

 The history of its amelioration is well known to us for the reason 

 that it has transpired within our own memory. Not many decades 

 ago the tomato was often known as the love-apple and was grown 

 mostly for ornament, much as the Jerusalem cherry is today. It was 

 regarded as being dangerously poisonous. Even the hogs were said 

 not to eat it. It belongs to the nightshade family, a group of plants 

 most of which are poisonous, and this helped to intensify popular 

 prejudice against it as a food. As we regard our delicious tomatoes 

 today we are constrained to laugh at the old opinion that it was a 

 poisonous plant. There was more ground for that impression than 

 we now think, however. Not only did it belong to a poisonous groups 

 of plants, but the unimproved forms were not only less toothsome,.. 

 but they were an inferior food to the highly improved varieties ot 

 tomatoes of the present. 'i 



The unimproved tomato had large seed cavities and very thin 

 flesh. The seeds were very numerous and surrounded by an excess 

 of watery and acetic juices. It had mostly deep wrinkles or sutures 

 extending deep between the divisions of the fruits and these did not 

 ripen evenly, so parts of the fruit were green when the outer wrinkles 

 were ripe. With the abundant food supply given to it under culture 

 and by careful selection, large, smooth, fleshy varieties, whose fruit 

 ripens evenly throughout have been evolved. More important yet has 

 been the elimination of the seeds to a large extent and the substituting 

 in their place, thick, fleshy walls to the fruit so that the most edible 

 part has increased, while the objectionaJDle seeds and their surrounding 

 watery parts have correspondingly disappeared. The best varieties 

 of today have thick, fleshy walls and partitions and very few seeds 

 as compared with the wild plant or the early varieties. 



The improvement of this fruit has gone on so rapidly that we 

 have round, compact tomatoes which are suited to different purposes. 

 Some are grown for canning, some for dessert fruit. We have early 

 and late varieties, those which are large and those which are small. 

 In fact, it may be said that the tomato has been practically perfected 

 as an edible vegetable or fruit within the lifetime of some of those 

 who are present. 



In certain sections of the country the cotton growers have had 

 their cotton fields laid waste by a wild disease which killed their 

 plants. Large areas of cotton plants have at times been an entire loss 

 to the farmer. The farmers, however, have persisted in planting. In 

 recent vears it has been observed that in some of the fields where 



