THE GOVERNMENT POLICY OF PLANT INTRODUCTION. 

 By David Fairchild, Washington, D. C. 



Delivered before the Society, with stereopticon illustrations, 

 January 20, 1912. 



It is now fourteen years since Congress first appropriated twenty 

 thousand dollars to be expended in securing rare and valuable 

 seeds and plants from foreign countries for the use of the experi- 

 ment stations and special experimenters, and it may well be asked, 

 "of what special benefit has this expenditure been to the country? " 



The policy of Federal Plant Introduction as it has been shaped 

 through the experience of these years is in some essentials different 

 from the policy of most countries which maintains government 

 botanic gardens and through them distribute plants to the public. 

 Instead of building up a great collection of plants, which is expensive 

 to maintain and represents only a small area of the country clima- 

 tologically, the whole country, as it were, has been treated as one 

 great arboretum and testing garden and sufficient quantities of 

 seeds or plants distributed to special experimenters to insure the 

 discovery of the region best adapted to their cultivation. Every 

 imported plant species, variety or strain has been recorded histori- 

 cally by its publication in an inventory, which is on file in every 

 agricultural library in the country. Every imported plant has 

 been given a number and in the inventory is printed a record of 

 where it was found, and when, by whom collected and sent in, and 

 why it is considered worthy of the attention of the iVmerican agri- 

 culturist and horticulturist. This inventory, started in 1898, 

 contains, quite independent of its value as the record of introduc- 

 tions, a mass of original observations made by trained explorers 

 in foreign countries regarding the plant industries of these various 

 regions, and since over twenty men have been sent on exploring 

 trips in search of seeds and plants, and the correspondents who 



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