The Forward Movement in Plant-Breeding 311 



now being done by officers of the experiment stations in 

 the United States and Canada, and by the United States 

 Department of Agriculture. In most of the experiment 

 stations there is at least one person interested in improv- 

 ing horticultural plants and others interested in field 

 crops; as there is an experiment station in every state 

 and territory and in the provinces of Canada, it will be 

 seen that there are several hundred persons who, by 

 their profession, are directly concerned in plant-breeding, 

 aside from a number of persons in the federal Department 

 of Agriculture who devote themselves exclusively to this 

 subject. 'The work is extended, also, into the hands of 

 various assistants in the different institutions ; so that it 

 is probably no exaggeration to say that three to four 

 hundred professional investigators are now giving atten- 

 tion, for a greater or less part of their time, to measures 

 for improving American crop production by means of 

 breeding. 



The breeding enterprises of the federal Department of 

 Agriculture were formerly confined to investigators in the 

 Plant-Breeding Laboratory. But the work has grown to 

 such an extent and breeding now touches so many phases 

 of plant work that the former organization, as such, has 

 been discontinued, and breeding is taken up in connec- 

 tion with many other departments. There is now more 

 of a tendency for the administrative divisions to group 

 themselves around the crops such as corn, cotton, wheat, 

 vegetables, and so forth, rather than processes such as 

 plant-breeding, or culture. 



The work of the federal investigators has been tre- 

 mendously important both from the standpoint of original 



