THE TRUE TEMPER OP EMPIRE. 



303 



motive of Kew is a desire to enable the Empire to compete with 

 the United States, Germany and France in the struggle for the 

 control of the tropics by abandoning the crude empiric methods, 

 long discarded by those powers in favour of metliods based on 

 scientific knowledge and specially adapted to the local environ- 

 ment of the areas of production. The work may be divided 

 into three heads. It provides a school of research and scientific 

 and practical teaching ; a central depot ; and a clearing-house. 

 In the school, young men are trained for appointments at- 

 botanical stations throughout the Empire. There are at present 

 about a hundred and sixty men, trained at Kew, serving in Asia, 

 America and Australia. As a central depot, Kew carries on the 

 work of identifying the species of economic plants best adapted 

 to climatic and other conditions in various parts of the Empire. 

 As a clearing-house, it distributes to stations throughout the 

 Empire plants likely to form the foundation of new cultures. 

 In the exchange of plants from these stations, they are received 

 at Kew, nursed to recovery, repacked and re-distributed. In 1898 

 the inspiring genius of Mr. Chamberlain brought Kew into* 

 etfective association with the local stations with which it had 

 been for many years in relation, by the corollary establishment 

 of a department of economic botany in the West Indies iin 

 charge of an officer styled the Imperial Commissioner of 

 Agriculture. There is probably no other organisation in any 

 part of the tropics where such diversified work is carried on over 

 so large an area and under such varying conditions of soil and 

 climate, so that scientific and practical training can be given in 

 the cultivation of crops suited to all tropical coijditions. The 

 department has served as a model for the formation of a series 

 of departments carrying on the same work, the first being the 

 Imperial Department of Agriculture in India. 



Other departments have since been ibrmed or reconstructed 

 on similar lines in Africa, Asia, and the Western Pacific. And 

 the work of these departments is supplemented by local 

 associations working in connection with them, of which the 

 Ceylon Agricultural Society may serve as an illustration and 

 model. Sir Henry Blake has given an interesting account of 

 this Society in 1908. " Its object was to bring all classes down 

 to the smallest cultivators into closer touch Vt^ith the Govern- 

 ment, with each other, and with the scientific staff of the 

 Botanic Department, for, if any improvement was to be hoped) 

 for, science must go hand in hand with labour. The' central 

 society was formed of all the members of the legislature, some 

 of the principal inhabitants, European and native, of each 



