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where they have prevailed, and also to prevent their contagion 

 being carried from one country to another. As long as 

 the progress of agriculture throughout the world and in the 

 tropics increases with that great rapidity with which it is 

 increasing at the present time, and the trade between one 

 country and another develops, the danger of the infection of 

 one country with the plant diseases of another must tend to 

 become more and more intense. I speak in this connection 

 with great interest of an institution of which the foreign 

 delegates here know, perhaps, more than some of our 

 British delegates dp that is to say, the International 

 Agricultural Institute at Rome. That Institute was founded 

 seven or eight years ago by the munificence of the King of 

 Italy. The King of Italy handed over for the purpose of 

 founding and maintaining that Institute an estate which 

 brings in a revenue of 300,000 lire per annum. Out of that 

 munificent donation a splendid office and palace were built 

 at Rome. Beginning with the study of the various processes 

 of production of agricultural products, the Institute has gone 

 on to consider the interests of agriculture from the inter- 

 national standpoint by the study of the diseases of animals 

 and of plants. The Institute has advanced progressively in the 

 direction of endeavouring to induce all the Governments of 

 the civilized world (and all the Governments of the civilized 

 world are represented in that Institute) to establish services 

 for the inspection of diseases of plants, with a view to 

 substituting for the absolute prohibition of the importation 

 of plants and seeds conditions under which plants and seeds 

 may be introduced without danger to the agricultural 

 economy of the country introducing them. The general 

 system which that International Institute, representing all 

 civilized Governments, aims at is to enable all Governments 

 to do what the foremost are already doing to have a 

 fully-equipped Department of Agriculture to study the 

 entomological and fungoid diseases to which plants are subject 

 with a view to notifying immediately whether such diseases 

 do exist or not, so that commerce may be carried on with 

 safety, and agriculture may be set forward in all the world, 

 by a combined attack upon disease of every form in every 

 climate. A special Conference was held this spring of 

 eminent agriculturists from Europe, America, and Asia, and 

 Mr. Rogers at that Conference represented the Department 

 of Agriculture of this country. We were also represented by 



