March 1908.] 



287 



Miscellaneous. 



turning from the creating of new 

 business projects into new fields of agri- 

 culture. These are the new conditions 

 in American agriculture that must be 

 met by new means, and the Department 

 of Agriculture, through the Office of Seed 

 and Plaut Introduction, is striving to 

 meet these demands. This office, with 

 its small appropriation of $40,000 a year 

 for the introduction of foreign plants, is 

 getting seeds and plants from the 

 most remote corners of the world for 

 thousands of private experimenters and 

 for the State Experiment Stations of the 

 country. Over a dozen new things a 

 day are entered on the list of new 

 arrivals, and these new seeds or 

 plants arrive by mail, express, and 

 freight, in quantities varying from a 

 single cutting in a tin tube to a ton of 

 seed of some African or Arabian grain. 



These things are not sent broadcast 

 over the country ; they cannot be had 

 merely for the asking. Each new ship- 

 ment represents a well-thought-out prob- 

 lem, for which some preparation has 

 been made, and the seed is too valuable 

 to be wasted by putting it in the hands 

 of those who want it merely because it 

 costs nothing, or who live in a region 

 which the meteorological data in the 

 office excludes from consideration as a 

 place where the new plant is likely to 

 find a congenial home. The new arrival 

 goes out to. some experiment station or 

 to some one who has satisfied the office 

 that he has the necessary means to take 

 care of it and the soil and climate in 

 which it will be likely to grow— to ex- 

 perimenters, in other words, who have 

 demonstrated their ability to try new 

 plants. These are chosen from the 

 organized institutes of research in each 

 State and by correspondence with private 

 individuals. 



AGRICULTURAL EXPLORERS. 



The securing of these things from the 

 ends of the earth is a work that has re- 

 quired the employment of exceptional 

 men, whose enthusiasm for discovery 

 would take them into dangerous places 

 and whose training had fitted them to 

 tell at a glance whether there was in a 

 new plant the possibility of its utilization 

 in this country. These men have been 

 botanists in the main, but not collec- 

 tors of dried plants. They have been in- 

 vestigators of uew crop possibilities, and 

 have kept always in view the fact that 

 what the country wants is something 

 that will grow and be profitable. The 

 finding of a new species did not distract 

 them from the object of their search, 

 which was to find the plant, whether 

 new to science or not, that was wanted 

 for the improvement of an existing in- 

 dustry or the establishment of a new one, 

 31 



The ground covered by these agricul- 

 tural explorers has been great, and in 

 this work of exploration the office has 

 been most fortunate in enlisting the 

 personal support of America's greatest 

 traveller, Mr. Barbour Lathrop, of 

 Chicago. Mr. Lathrop, at his own ex- 

 pense, conducted his explorations for 

 nearly six years into most of the 

 promising plant-growing regions of 

 the world, taking the writer with 

 him in all his travels as his expert. 

 With the host of correspondents estab- 

 lished during these long voyages, and 

 those made by the various agricultural 

 explorers that the office itself has kept 

 in the field, the machinery of getting 

 new plants is better organised in this 

 office than anywhere else in the world. 

 We have traversed the Russian steppes 

 and entered Turkestan ; we have scoured 

 the coast of North Africa from the Suez 

 Canal to Morocco, visiting oases in which 

 no white man has been for twenty-five 

 years ; we have investigated the in- 

 dustries of Italy, Greece, and Austro- 

 Hungary : the Valley of the Nile, with 

 its host of irrigated crops, has been 

 given a thorough study ; Japan, with its 

 peculiar and suggestive agriculture, has 

 been drawn upon by our explorers ; 

 India and the Dutch East Indies, with 

 their wealth of material of value for the 

 warmer portions of the country, have 

 been touched, but not yet explored; 

 Arabian date regions have been visited 

 and their possibilities exploited ; South 

 America have been given a short visit of 

 reconnaissance; and East Africa, Cape 

 Colony, and the Transvaal, Sweden, and 

 Finland have been visited but not ex- 

 plored. The almost unlimited plant re- 

 sources of the Chinese kingdom are being 

 probed by a trained agricultural ex- 

 plorer, Mr. Prank N. Myer. Hosts of 

 things are coming in from his explora- 

 tions that we are not yet in a position to 

 talk about, siuce few of them have 

 left the cool chambers in which they 

 will remain until planting time, in the 

 spring. Hardier persimmons and peaches 

 from the orginial home of the peach, in- 

 teresting new grapes, luscious Chinese 

 pears, and hardy bamboos are on the 

 long list of things already en route to 

 America. 



A glance at the great plant industries 

 of this country shows that they have 

 nearly all of them been influenced in the 

 past, and are still being changed and 

 bettered by the introduction ot new 

 plants. 



THE DURUM WHEAT INDUSTRY. 



The durum wheat, from which the bread 

 of the common people is made in 

 Southern Europe and Russia, was almost 

 an unknown thing on our grain markets 



