GOVERNMENT POLICY OF PLANT INTRODUCTION 39 



was twenty years ago, I feel we who have built up the work have 

 cause to be gratified that the world of intelligent people have 

 moved forward and taken a world standpoint. 



If therefore none of the thirty-odd thousand plant species or 

 varieties which have come in under Government auspices should 

 have proven great successes there would still remain a mass of 

 valuable material to warrant very substantial expenditures. 



But successes have come in this plant introduction work which 

 have far surpassed the dreams of the little group of enthusiasts 

 who started it. 



Making due allowances for the land speculation which has found 

 in date culture in California a peculiarly attractive lure to the 

 eastern tenderfoot, the American date industry may be said to be 

 passing into the commercial stage. At the present time a private 

 firm has its agents in Algeria buying a thousand date suckers for 

 commercial plantings. The largest date importer in the country 

 has expressed astonishment at the excellent quality of the dates 

 produced in the Salton Basin. The fifteen acre date orchard estab- 

 lished by the Government at Mecca, California, has attracted 

 thousands of visitors to it this year, and the individual private 

 orchards which are springing up around it and the purchases of 

 land suital )le for date culture indicate that those who have made the 

 closest study from a practical point of view of the date situation 

 are willing to put their money into it with the idea of making a 

 living out of the cultivation of the date palm. The crop this year 

 from the Government and private gardens has amounted to many 

 tons of dates and the best of these have been purchased locally 

 at fancy prices. There seems, therefore, to be no question of the 

 constant and growing demand for these American grown dates 

 whenever they are properly ripened, and the artificial method of 

 ripening them which has been practised by Department experi- 

 menters has turned out a product which is as good as the best 

 imported article. Naturally there have been some surprises and 

 many disappointments in this work, and some regions which were 

 first selected as suitable for date growing have proven ill adapted 

 for this purpose. This problem, therefore, is really past the ex- 

 perimental stage of plant introduction and become a project of 

 the Ofhce of Crop Physiology and Plant Breeding. There are 



