IS ACCLIMATIZATION AN IMPOSSIBILITY? 73 



dry, cold climate with wet, warm climate plants. This is a very 

 fundamental proposition. The farmers of America have spent 

 hundreds of millions in the vain effort to acclimate certain 

 plants. Let it now be placed on record that my study of horti- 

 cultural problems in the prairie northwest has taught me to have 

 no faith in the possibility of acclimating plants to a greater de- 

 gree of cold than that to which they are accustomed in their 

 original habitat. I believe that those who are attempting to 

 acclimate the common alfalfa, brought over from northern Africa 

 by the Spaniards to South America and thence to California, 

 to the conditions of our prairie northwest, are starting on a ten- 

 thousand-year job and hence impossible. This led me as the 

 first agricultural explorer -from the United States Department of 

 Agriculture to attempt in 1897-1898 an overland trip of two 

 thousand miles through northern Turkestan, western China and 

 southern Siberia in the endeavor to find a hardy form of the 

 common alfalfa. Blizzards interfered and the trip was a severe 

 test of endurance. As a result of the trip Turkestan alfalfa was 

 brought to America for the first time for the spring of 1898. 

 This initial exportation of eighteen thousand pounds I under- 

 stand from good authority, has now risen to nearly five million 

 pounds exported annually, the larger part of which goes to South 

 America and about a hundred and fifty tons to the United 

 States, and the amount is fast increasing. Turkestan alfalfa 

 has proven to be more resistant to cold and drought than the 

 ordinary alfalfa. But I was not satisfied that I had secured 

 the most northern form of the alfalfa, so in a six-months' trip 

 in the summer and fall of last year, I made another attempt and 

 found that there were other species, yellow flowered, extending 

 north of the common alfalfa limits one to two thousand miles 

 across Asiatic Siberia. I only hope it will help to solve the 

 alfalfa question -on the American continent and that it will carry 

 the alfalfa belt north as far as we care to farm. 



SUMMARY. 



My belief concisely stated is that to breed plants so that 

 they will endure a greater degree of cold is a work demanding 

 such a great period of time that it is for nature rather than 



