486 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 19 60 



ington, Clemson in South Carolina, Stoneville in Mississippi, and 

 College Station in Texas. 



The response of the cotton seed breeders was hardly less than jubi- 

 lant. The late Dr. George Wilds, then President and Chief Geneti- 

 cist of the Coker Pedigreed Seed Company, addressed the South 

 Carolina Chemurgic Conference at Columbia in 1942 on the advan- 

 tages of the new service and took occasion to pay special tribute to Dr. 

 Webb. The studies up to that time. Dr. Wilds said, illustrate im- 

 mediate possibilities of great improvement and he added : 



This service gives us an opportunity to breed cottons that will reach new 

 horizons in quality, but only if we avail ourselves of this opportunity. This is 

 a distinct challenge to the commercial breeder, for it is to him that most cotton 

 growers look for improved seed. This service can be of inestimable value, and 

 by using it, quality can be reflected into the American crop quicker than any 

 other way. 



That this was indeed a suicere and genuine statement is attested by 

 the character of the speaker and by the fact later reported by his suc- 

 cessor, Robert Coker, that his company had "invested" no less than 

 $75,000 in fees paid to the laboratory at Clemson College for evalua- 

 tion of its improved strains. But the new service was only an off- 

 shoot — a practical application of results — of the research up to that 

 time. The program of fiber research that made this service possible 

 was still to be amplified and intensified, not in one laboratory alone 

 but in scores of others as well. 



With the wide appeal of the work and its application to diverse 

 segments of the industry, it was inevitable that organizational prob- 

 lems should arise. In research aimed at improvement of marketing 

 procedure and of the grade and staple-length standards, the Bureau 

 of Agricultural Economics was well within its jurisdiction. But re- 

 search aimed at crop improvement was logically a function of produc- 

 tion agencies, most specifically at that time of the Bureau of Plant 

 Industry, which now faced a burgeoning need to apply the new 

 methods of fiber analysis in its own work. For a time this situation 

 was bridged by a cooperative arrangement, under which Webb's 

 laboratory undertook to make its facilities and skills available to the 

 Plant Industry program in return for certain contributions of salaries 

 and material. Meanwhile, however, came the establishment in the 

 Bureau of Chemistry of four great regional research laboratories, the 

 purpose of which was to find means of increasing the use of surplus 

 agricultural products as raw materials of industry. Thus a new and 

 direct link with the cotton industry was created in which fiber analysis 

 was a prime essential. Webb was called upon to give up some of the 

 key members of his staff to form the nucleus of the fiber group of the 

 Southern Regional Laboratory at New Orleans. Then, in the course 



