NEW HORTICULTURAL CROPS FOR FOOD SUPPLY 53 



Inspiration for this discussion of the undeveloped food resources 

 of the plant-kingdom came to the speaker from the use of notes left 

 at the New York Agricultural Experiment Station by the first 

 director of the station, the late Dr. E. Lewis Sturtevant, during his 

 active life a member of this Society, who gave much time to the 

 study of economic botany. His pen contributions on cultivated 

 plants in agricultural and botanical magazines co\-er thirty years 

 and number many titles. In addition, the unpublished material 

 just mentioned, under the heading "Edible Plants of the World" 

 takes up over 1,600 typewritten pages. During his life. Dr. 

 Sturtevant was in the full tide of American science, but I am sure 

 could he have lived to publish the great treatise which he had 

 planned on edible plants, and upon which he worked for twenty 

 years, we should give him much higher rank with giants of science, 

 and that his book would now be the magnum opus of economic 

 botany. 



De CandoUe, as we have seen, includes but 247 cultivated species 

 in his work. This is approximately the number generally thought 

 to minister to the alimentary wants of man. Sturtevant, in his 

 notes on edible plants, enumerates 1,11.3 domesticated species now 

 cultivated, and a total of 4,447 species, some part or parts of which 

 are edible. Following De CandoUe, Sturtevant made use of botany, 

 archeology, paleontology, history and philology in obtaining his 

 data. He searched the literature of the world from the earliest 

 records in Egyptian, Chinese and Phoenician until the time of his 

 death to make a complete record of the edible plants of the world. 

 Sturtevant's were the species, too, of a generation ago, many of 

 which have since been divided twice, thrice, or oftener by later 

 botanists. It is said that no food plant of established field culture 

 has ever gone out of cultivation, an approximate truth, at least, 

 from which we may presume that the number of cultivated plants 

 is not smaller than the numbers given from our author's notes. 



In leaving this phase of my subject, I can not but say, despite 

 the fulness of Sturtevant's notes, the feeling comes in reading them, 

 as it does in reading De CandoUe, Darwin or whoever has ^\Titten 

 on the domestication of plants, that what has so far been found out 

 is so little in comparison to what we ought to know regarding the 

 modification of cultivated plants by man, that our present knowl- 

 edge but makes more apparent the dire poverty of our information. 



