IMPORTANCE OF PLANT INTRODUCTION 



71 



The first government work in agricul- 

 ture was to introduce new plants, but of 

 this early work, no doubt much of it im- 

 portant to the country, only traces or 

 legends remain. Few records of the various 

 introductions are to be found, and hardly 

 a trace of where they were planted. Mr. 

 Ellsworth's idea was good, but the experi- 

 ence of the past seven years has shown 

 where the weakness lay. The seeds and 

 plants collected by those in the diplomatic 

 service were not gathered by trained men 

 who knew the agricultural needs of the 

 country, but were, in the great majority of 

 cases, gathered by men who saw in a new 

 plant some useful quality, without having 

 the training necessary to find out whether 

 it was capable of being adapted to our quite 

 different conditions of labor, or to know in 

 what part of the country it should be tried. 

 An immense amount of valuable introduction 

 work was done later by Mr. Saunders, who, 

 for many years, had charge of the gardens 

 and grounds of the Department of Agricul- 

 ture, but no connected record of it exists. 

 In 1870, the government made a notable 

 introduction of cions of Russian apples. 



The work of persons not connected with 

 government departments should not be for- 

 gotten. Nurserymen and seedsmen have 

 long been in the habit of introducing inter- 

 esting plants from many countries. Many 

 times they have introduced plants in ad- 

 vance of the popular necessity for them, and 

 the introductions have disappeared, to be 

 introduced again later. Many citizens, from 

 Washington down, have been influential in 

 introducing plants. In later years the work of the late Professor Budd, of Iowa, and the late Charles 

 Gibb, of Quebec, in introducing Russian fruits should not be overlooked, for they were pioneers in the 

 modern movement. 



Fie. 89. 



Four types of Tunisian dates, showing the variation 

 In this fruit. 



The organization of plant4ntrodnetion work and 

 some of its problems. 



It was not until 1897 that this great work of 

 finding, getting, importing, and sending out new 

 plants was put on a scientific basis and the Section 

 of Seed and Plant Introduction made an integral 

 part of the Department of Agriculture. The organ- 

 ization of the Ofiice as it tow stands owes its 

 smoothly working machinery to the painstaking 

 efforts of Mr. Adrian J. Pieters, who has put into 

 the work years of study and thought, and who, 

 together with the writer, has general charge today. 

 This Office has almost constantly had agricultural 

 explorers and collectors in the field, and has worked 

 out a system that takes care of every plant sent in 

 and of every seed distributed, and it is on a basis 

 of accurate cooperation with the experiment sta- 



tions and farmers all over the country. Every 

 one of the more than 19,000 specimens that have 

 been sent in by agricultural explorers, by friends 

 of the work or by correspondents, or that have 

 been purchased abroad, has been put on permanent 

 record and then sent out to some one who was 

 especially interested in it ; and, as far as possible, 

 each introduction has been followed up and the 

 result recorded. Over 120,000 cards record the 

 distributions, and thousands of reports now on 

 file form a most valuable historical record of 

 the systematic plant introductions of the past 

 eight years. The aim of the work has been pre- 

 eminently a practical one, and the introductions 

 have been made to meet some demand either of an 

 experiment station or of a plant-breeder, or to 

 carry out the idea of some one of the explorers 

 who saw in a foreign plant industry the possibility 



