428 TEE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTELY 



JEWISH COLONIZATION" IN PALESTINE 



By O. F. COOK 



BUREAU OF PLANT INDUSTRY 



HISTOEICAL and religious interest has been responsible for many- 

 investigations and explorations in Palestine, but the country- 

 has still to receive an adequate study from the biological and agricul- 

 tural standpoints. What we are pleased to describe as European civil- 

 ization had its rise in western Asia and was based on the cultivation of 

 plants indigenous in that region. The agriculture and agricultural 

 plants of western Asia were brought to Europe in prehistoric times as 

 a part of the equipment of the ancient Mediterranean civilization. To 

 become familiar with the primitive stocks of our cultivated plants and 

 the primitive agricultural arts that are still practised in this cradle- 

 land of civilization is quite as interesting as reconstructing its ruined 

 cities or digging out its buried inscriptions. We have much more 

 adequate knowledge of incidents of ancient history than we have of the 

 underlying agricultural and social conditions. 



Even among those who have urged the colonization of Palestine for 

 reasons of philanthropy and national patriotism there has been rather 

 tardy appreciation of the importance of scientific exploration and in- 

 vestigation of agricultural resources. It remained for American Jews 

 who have relatively little interest in the colonization idea to undertake 

 the investigation of the country from the broader motive of human 

 welfare, and as a means of securing for American agriculture the advan- 

 tages of better knowledge of the agriculture of western Asia, whence so 

 many of our American crops have come. There is a special reason why 

 this agricultural knowledge is likely to be much more valuable in the 

 United States than in Europe, for we have in our Pacific coast and 

 southwestern states enormous agricultural resources still undeveloped 

 under natural conditions that are much more Asiatic than European. 

 In other words, we have need to go back to Asia to get the remainder of 

 the agricultural plants and agricultural knowledge that was not carried 

 to northern Europe because the European conditions were unfavorable. 

 Thus the establishment of colonies of European Jews in Palestine has 

 had the entirely unexpected result of opening the country to agricul- 

 tural exploration in the interest of American agriculture. 



The establishment of an agricultural experiment station in Pales- 

 tine was announced in Science in 1909. 1 The director of this station, 



1 Fairchild, David, "An American Besearch Institution in Palestine. The 

 Jewish Agricultural Experiment Station at Haifa," Science, N". S., 31: 376. 



