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where they have prevailed, and also to prevent their contagion 
being carried from one country to another. As long as 
the progress of agriculture throughout the world and in the 
tropics increases with that great rapidity with which it is 
increasing at the present time, and the trade between one 
country and another develops, the danger of the infection of 
one country with the plant diseases of another must tend to 
become more and more intense. I speak in this connection 
with great interest of an institution of which the foreign 
delegates here know, perhaps, more than some of our 
British delegates do—that is to say, the International 
Agricultural Institute at Rome. That Institute was founded 
seven or eight years ago by the munificence of the King of 
Italy. The King of Italy handed over for the purpose of 
founding and maintaining that Institute an estate which 
brings in a revenue of 300,000 lire per annum. Out of that 
munificent donation a splendid office and palace were built 
at Rome. Beginning with the study of the various processes 
of production of agricultural products, the Institute has gone 
on to consider the interests of agriculture from the inter- 
national standpoint by the study of the diseases of animals 
and of plants. The Institute has advanced progressively in the 
direction of endeavouring to induce all the Governments of 
the civilized world (and all the Governments of the civilized 
world are represented in that Institute) to establish services 
for the inspection of diseases of plants, with a view to 
substituting for the absolute prohibition of the importation 
of plants and seeds conditions under which plants and seeds 
may be introduced without danger to the agricultural 
economy of the country introducing them. The general 
system which that International Institute, representing all 
civilized Governments, aims at is to enable all Governments 
to do what the foremost are alreadv doing—to have a 
fully-equipped Department of Agriculture to study the 
entomological and fungoid diseases to which plants are subject 
with a view to notifying immediately whether such diseases 
do exist or not, so that commerce may be carried on with 
safety, and agriculture may be set forward in all the world, 
by a combined attack upon disease of every form in every 
climate. A special Conference was held this spring of 
eminent agriculturists from Europe, America, and Asia, and 
Mr. Rogers at that Conference represented the Department 
of Agriculture of this country. We were also represented by 
