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It is when I think of the rare pleasures which 

 were in store for Meyer in the evening of his life, 

 watching these plants of his become more important 

 every year, that the tragedy of his early death seems 

 keenest. He might have wandered under avenues of his 

 Chinese pistache, or rested under the shade of his 

 dry-land elm, or strolled through orchards of his Fei 

 tcheng peach; the earliest ripening cherries in Amer- 

 ica he might have picked from trees in this country 

 grown from scions he secured in Tangsi, and he might 

 have gathered hardy walnuts from his Manchurian wal- 

 nut trees, or sweet chestnuts from his blight resis- 

 tant chestnut trees: he might- have eaten candied 

 Chinese haws, or bought in our markets delicious 

 Chinese jujubes grown in large orchards in California 

 and our Southwest. How each industry, each successful 

 introduction would have brought to his mind the inci- 

 dents of its discovery and given him a thrill of sat- 

 isfaction over a difficult work which was destined to 

 enrich the horticulture of the whole world! 



But there is another side than that of the per- 

 sonal loss which we all feel on reading the brief 

 cables that, flashed around the world, tell of the 

 ending of Meyer's work. It is the realization of the 

 greatness of the loss to the horticultural world. 



It was in the work of ferreting out the details 

 of the culture and proper handling of the thousands 

 of his introductions that Meyer excelled, and now all 

 this gathered plant lore from which we had expected 

 to draw in years to come is gone. His notes were re- 

 markable characterizations of the uses and cultural 

 requirements of the plants he studied, and are in 

 themselves distinct contributions to the horticultural 

 literature of today; but they are very little compared 

 to what he could have told us himself. 



Frank N. Meyer was born in Amsterdam, Holland, 

 and from boyhood he showed a love of plants and a 

 lust for travel. He used to tell us how he walked 

 over the Alps into Italy to see the orange groves 

 there and then walked back again. For several years 

 he was the Assistant in the Amsterdam Botanical Garden 

 and was closely associated with Hugo de Vries during 

 the years when the latter was writing his book on Mu- 

 tations. Coming to America with letters from Professor 

 de Vries and from the Dutch poet Van Eden, he began 

 working in the greenhouses of the Department. His 

 craving for travel caused him, however, to wander to 

 California, and through Mexico and back on foot; later 



