6 SEEDS AND PLANTS IMPORTED. 



tion has cost. While individual firms, through the increasing inter- 

 course between countries, ran be depended on more and more to 

 introduce varieties of staple crops 3 there is no money to be made from 

 the search for these wild forms for the use of plant breeders, who are 

 generally spending all the money they ran spare on their nurseries 

 and trial grounds. 



li is therefore a legitimate work for the Government to aid these 

 experimenters, who are at the same time benefactors and who seldom 

 make financial gains from their new originations, because there is no 

 way of retaining control of their sale Long enough to make them very 

 profitable. 



It may not be out of place to give here some idea of the labor 

 involved in taking care of these new introduction- as they come in. 



In order to be as sure as possible that no plant gets in which is 

 likely to be a weed or thai has on Li some dangerous insect pest or 

 other plant disease; that, so far as it is possible to determine from an 

 examination of the seeds or cuttings, the plant comes in under its 

 true name; that the seeds arc not dead before they are sent out; that 

 the information which conn- with the seeds is recorded on the inven- 

 tory cards from which this printed inventory is made up. and that the 

 experimenter in the field is written to and the shipment to him 

 recorded in a card catalogue, every new introduction has to pass 

 through the hands of fourteen different clerk- or experts. 



The time consumed in carrying out these different steps is gener- 

 ally from one to two week- if there are not discovered on the ship- 

 ment some diseases which make a quarantine necessary, in which 

 case a much longer time will be required for the necessary fumigation 

 and disinfection. 



This large amount of labor is necessary, and it forms one of the 

 reasons why the friends of this work who so kindly offer to send 

 gratis all sorts of things from their regions have to be sent discour- 

 aging or rather uiiappreciative replies. It is Mich an easy thing to 

 import a small packet of seeds or a few cuttings and such an expen- 

 sive thing to get it into the hand- of a great number of experimenters 

 that unless the attention of the office force is limited to the handling 

 of such thing- as are on the programme, so to speak, those actually 

 imported will not get the attention they require. With increased 

 funds an increasing number of new introductions will be handled. 



Among the more notable collections which appear in this inventory 

 are those of our agricultural explorer Mr. Frank X. Meyer, who has 

 spent the entire time represented by this inventory in northern China 

 and who has with most unusual devotion and bravery gathered to- 

 gether and successfully gotten to this country 680 different things. 

 He has collected personally the seeds and cuttings of valuable trees 

 and shrubs from the neighborhood of Peking; forage crops from 



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