Rrsi^ARcn ON Plant Tumors 519 



" How much my work has directly profited agriculture and horti- 

 culture,'" wrote Smith to Moore, " I have no means of knowing. 

 It has Ix^en largely a breaking of new ground for the benefit of 

 other workers. Some practical procedures have been modified as 

 a result of it, e. g., inspections for certain diseases," and this held 

 true from the start of his work on peach yellows through his study 

 of crown gall, especially as to rules of orchard and nursery prac- 

 tice and of inspection of shipments. In 1926,"^ for a descriptive 

 study of various types of work done in the Department of Agri- 

 culture, Smith placed at a half a million dollars the estimated 

 annual saving made possible to the nation by the work of his 

 laboratory. This, he believed, was probably a conservative esti- 

 mate, a:nd, compared with the annual sum of (until then) less 

 than one-tenth that amount received for his laboratory from the 

 total appropriation for federal agricultural work, its value was 

 easily demonstrated. "About half of the bacterial diseases of 

 cultivated plants now recognized as serious," he said in this 

 report, " have been discovered and worked out in his laboratory 

 and extensive investigations have been made of the greater number 

 of the remainder." There was, furthermore, the work in fungous, 

 virus, and other types of plant disease research. 



On March 9, 1920, Robert S. Woodward, president of the Car- 

 negie Institution of Washington, wrote Smith that "" the two works 

 published by the Institution which [had] been most in demand 

 during the w^orld war [had been] two works which [had] ema- 

 nated from the United States Department of Agriculture" — 

 Mosquitoes of North and Central America and the West Indies, 

 by Dr. L. O. Howard and others, and Smith's Bacteria in Relation 

 to Plant Diseases. Dr. Woodward quoted from his recent report 

 to the Institution's trustees: " Few of our contemporaries two 

 decades ago, say, would have thought it more than a trivial 

 matter whether a mosquito is designated as culex, anopheles or 

 stegomyia. Similarly few of us would have thought ten years ago 

 that a w^ork on bacteriology could have become at any time a 

 ' better seller ' than the Institution's works on archaeology, history 

 or literature." Smith was pleased, and especially by Woodward's 

 added comment: " These instances serve to illustrate the truth 



*" Memorandum 249, October, 1926, addressed to the chief of the Bureau of Plant 

 Industry, op. cit., chapter VIII. 



