﻿INVENTORY OF SEEDS AND PLANTS IMPORTED 

 BY THE OFFICE OF FOREIGN SEED AND PLANT 

 INTRODUCTION DURING THE PERIOD FROM JULY 

 1 TO SEPTEMBER 30, 1916 (NO. 48; NOS. 48013 TO 

 43890). 



INTRODUCTORY STATEMENT. 



This inventory represents a period of great unrest and lists but 

 few introductions by agricultural explorers who were in foreign 

 countries. It covers a period when shipping facilities were more 

 unsettled than they had been at any time from the outbreak of the 

 war up to the time of America's entrance into it. In consequence 

 it is one of the smallest inventories that have been issued for years. 



Notwithstanding these handicaps, some important introductions 

 are described in it ; and these it may be well to emphasize. 



The growing realization among manufacturers of the importance 

 of the discovery of the hydrogenation of vegetable oils is rapidly put- 

 ting the palm oils, nut oils, and all other oils in quite a new category. 

 As one chemist has expressed it: "Since these discoveries, which 

 have made it possible to transmute, so to speak, vegetable oils into 

 all sorts of substances useful to man, the oil industries are coming to 

 be understood as of greater importance to the human race than the 

 great steel and iron industries." 



It is therefore from this new point of view of the importance of 

 vegetable oils that the successful cultivation of the Brazil nut (No. 

 43114) in Ceylon and the Straits Settlements is worth recording and 

 action upon the problem of its forest planting in Porto Rico urged. 

 The Java almond, Canarium indicum (No. 43024), not only one of 

 the stateliest avenue trees in Java, but also a tree yielding an abun- 

 dance of large-kerneled nuts, the oil from which has been successfully 

 used by the Dutch in emulsions as an infant food, is worthy of 

 study. The soft lumbang of the Philippines, Aleurites trisperma 

 (No. 43389), which yields a quicker drying oil than the true lum- 

 bang, A. moluccana, may prove adapted to culture in Porto Rico or 

 Cuba; and its introduction brings up the whole question of the 

 hybridization of the various species of Aleurites, the members of 



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