38 MASSACHUSETTS HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY 



preserved, is already proving of great value in the work of identi- 

 fication. 



And last but not to my mind by any means least is to be men- 

 tioned as in the category of indirect accomplishments resulting from 

 the Government Policy of Plant Introduction, a new feature which 

 will this spring characterize our distributions. It has long been a 

 dream of mine to send attached to every experimental plant when 

 it goes to an experiment station or private experimenter, an ade- 

 quate descriptive label in permanent form so that for three years 

 at least every time the experimenter sees the plant he may read 

 a statement about its value and requirements and this without 

 returning to his house or library and looking it up in a book. It 

 is a curious fact that on the one hand the seedsman prints an account 

 of a flower or vegetable on the envelope of his penny packet of 

 seeds and you are forced to throw the description away when you 

 discard the packet at the time when you plant the seeds, while 

 on the other hand he merely pencils the scientific name on a wooden 

 tag when he sends you a dollar plant, and the copper wire either 

 strangles your plant if you leave it on or the tag splits and is lost 

 if you tie it to a stake. We expect to accompany each new plant 

 distributed the coming year with a fifty word description on a 

 permanent label and have devised a simple method of preparing 

 these labels which may be found worthy of adoption by nursery- 

 men generally. 



But of all the factors in this great problem the psychological 

 one is perhaps the greatest. I consider it no small accomplish- 

 ment to build up through judicious selection of plants and through 

 careful presentation of the experimental character of the material 

 a corps of several thousand experimenters. To know that all over 

 the country they are watching with critical attention the behavior 

 of these new immigrants, not because they have been deceived 

 into thinking the plants are of great value but because they enjoy 

 to experiment with new plants, is a great satisfaction, and when I 

 look back to the skepticism of a former Secretary of Agriculture, 

 whose declaration was cabled to me in Corsica that there was no 

 reason for bringing in new plants, and compare it with the great 

 optimism of Secretary Wilson, without whose support Govern- 

 ment Plant Introduction would })e today in as chaotic a state as it 



