Fairchild: The Dramatic Careers of Two Plantsmen 



279 



throughout the summer. His notes, 

 published in the ' ' Inventories of Seeds 

 and Plants Imported," of the Office of 

 Foreign Seed and Plant Introduction, 

 are full of suggestions to plant breeders, 

 and, luckily, his suggestions are backed 

 up by living material which will make it 

 easy to provide the breeders with many 

 of the plants which he describes. 



Meyer collected a very wide range of 

 plants. He collected wild alfalfas in 

 the Caucasus, Chinese Turkestan and 

 Siberia; sorghums and Chinese pears in 

 Manchuria; wild peaches and almonds 

 in the Kansu Province; chestnuts east 

 of Pekin; persimmons in the Ming 

 Tombs Valley; wild conifers in the 

 Wu Tai Shan; citrus fruits on the 

 Upper Yangtze; bamboos and straw- 

 berry trees (the Yang mae) south of 

 Shanghai; jujubes and the pound peach 

 in the Shantung Province; dwarf al- 

 monds, dwarf cherries and apricots and 

 large fruited oleasters in Russian Tur- 

 kestan; desert poplars and tamarisks, 

 wheats and barleys in the desert region 

 of Chinese Turkestan; wild apples and 

 apricots in the Tisu Shan range which 

 divides Siberia and Chinese Turkestan; 

 large fruited black currants from the 

 Yakutsk Province of Siberia. 



I doubt if any man has traveled more 

 miles on foot than Meyer did, in search 

 of his plants. He was attacked by 

 ruffians in Harbin; his life was threat- 

 ened by Chinese soldiers in Kansu, 

 who stood him up against the wall. 

 He spent months in the uncomfortable 

 inns and was quartered in temples and 

 other strange places in China. He ran 

 the gauntlet of suspicious Russian 

 officials on the border between Siberia 

 and China at a time when the relations 

 between these two countries were 

 strained. He had the distinction of 

 having his photographs of deforestation 

 in China used by President Roosevelt 

 in his message to Congress. Shut in 

 by the Chinese revolution in Ichang for 

 many months, his health, which had 

 begun to feel the effects of lonely travel, 

 broke down and, when finally he suc- 

 ceeded in escaping, the strain appears 

 to have been too much. He disappeared 

 from the river steamer in the middle of 



the night of June 2, 1918, and his body 

 was found several days later by the 

 American consul at the little town 

 of Wuhu, where the Chinese, who had 

 found it in the river, had temporarily 

 buried it, and from which place it 

 was taken to Shanghai, where it now 

 rests. 



Aaron Aaronsohn began his life on 

 horseback, so to speak. On his Arab 

 steed he traversed the Jordan and 

 chmbed the slopes of Mount Hermon in 

 the Holy Land. Educated as a protege 

 of Baron Rothschild, in Grignon, France, 

 and as a friend of the African explorer 

 Schweinfurth in Berlin, he early became 

 interested in the wild plants of Palestine 

 and made collections of the wild forms. 

 Urged on by his professors in Bonn and 

 Munich to discover the origin of the 

 cultivated wheat plant, he found on the 

 slopes of Mount Hermon a truly wild 

 wheat, which has been subsequently 

 named by 0. F. Cook in honor of the 

 discovery, Triticum hermoni. Because 

 of the fact that certain crosses of culti- 

 vated wheats revert to it in character, 

 and from the fact of its undoubted wild 

 character, it appears in all probability 

 to be one of the progenitors of wheat, 

 the greatest cereal of civilized man, 

 rather than a cultivated form gone 

 wild. 



Coming to America to study American 

 conditions, Aaronsohn interested the 

 Department of Agriculture in his Pales- 

 tine researches, and through the friends 

 he made here and guided by the advice 

 of department men, he established the 

 first agricultural experiment station 

 along American lines to be started out- 

 side the confines of the United States. 



After four years of organization work, 

 the war storm broke over the institu- 

 tion, wrecked it completely and forced 

 Aaronsohn to flee. His life, which had 

 been spectacular enough during peace 

 times, became infinitely more exciting, 

 and the story of his escape through 

 Austria and Germany into Denmark 

 on the plea that if he could only get the 

 advice of Johannson of Copenhagen or 

 Nilsson of Svalof, Sweden, he could 

 produce by a selection a variety of 

 sesame which would produce increased 



