Stiidii-s on Crown (i,\i i. oi Plants -111 



I attended the nieetinqs of the Int[ernalional] Conference of Plant 

 Breeding held under the auspices of the Royal Horticultural Society and 

 spoke for about twenty five minutes. . . . The speech was well received and 

 very many nice things were said about the proL;ressive spirit of our Depart- 

 ment whiLh I wish you and the Secretary could have heard. They seemed 

 to be so genuine. They admitted freely that wc arc far ahead of the Ent;lish 

 in all sorts of experimental work for the benefit of ai^riculture, that we put 

 more money and more men into it, all with astonishingly good results, 

 which makes them ashamed of the little England is doing. " When will 

 our own country wake up to the necessities of the case.'' " seemed to be their 

 common cry. They also praised the generosity of the Department in fur- 

 nishing information and publications for all who would be benefited, 

 irrespective of nationality. Sir Daniel Morris ^'- and Mr. Pawcctt of the 

 West Indies praised us'particularly for the courtesies we have extended 

 to them. 



Tlie Royal Society ended by drawing up a resolution which has been 

 transmitted to our minister here to be forwarded through the Secretary of 

 State, thanking the President of the United States and Secretary Wilson 

 for sending me over! I had nothing to do with it, and don't know what 

 the resolution is like but should like to sec it if it comes into your hands. 

 I was treated with great courtesy. . . . 



Morris read an important paper on hybrid sugar canes, ^^ some of which 

 might be useful to our Louisiana planters. He said their best seedling 

 cane was No. 208. This is very resistant to disease. It is a large yellow cane 

 and yields three tons of sugar cane per acre in the Barbados. He stated that 

 the sugar industry in the Br[itish} West Indies would have gone to the 

 wall during the last eight years from diseases, but for these new canes 

 which they have been able to produce by hybridization and are now in 

 general cultivation. 



The most important paper ^* of the Conference was by Mr. Biffen i"' 

 who has found a perfectly rust resistant wheat which he calls x, having 

 been unable to determine its name. This when crossed with Michigan 

 Bronze, a variety which rusts with him very badly every year, gave a certain 

 portion of hybrids entirely free from rust. The patch as a whole appeared 



^- Imperial Commissioner of Agriculture for the West Indies. 



^^ The improvement of the sugar-cane by selection and hybridisation, Rep't Srd 

 Conj. on Genetics, op. cit., 310 ff. Note appended that seedling canes mentioned 

 had been grown successfully in Louisiana: announced since paper was written. 



** Rowland H. Biffen, Experiments on the breeding of wheats for English con- 

 ditions, Rep't 3rd Conj. on Genetics, op. cit., biy^ll. See also, E. S. Salmon, On 

 raising strains of plants resistant to fungus disease, idem, 378-382. At p. 382, 

 susceptibility to, and immunity from, at least rust were said to have been shown 

 by Biffen's work to be Mendelian characters transmitted as regards inheritance in 

 accordance with the ratios enunciated by Mendel in his paper on " Plant Hybrids," 

 supra. 



^^ University Department of Agriculture, Cambridge, England. Sec Bacteria in 

 relation to plant diseases, op. cit., 3: 154, where Smith told of a conversation in 

 1906 with Biffen concerning a disease of mangolds and sugar-beet on which the 

 latter had published in 1901. 



