any of the matters relating to the insect diseases of plants, to 
forests or parks or soil or to the chemistry of plants. These are 
entirely separate Bureaus with their own appropriations. 
Our Bureau of Plant Industry is spending half as much as 
the Rockefeller Foundation, nearly three times as much as the 
Carnegie Institution, nearly five times as much as the Smithson- 
ian and over sixty times as much as Kew Gardens. 
Let me give you some idea of the special branches in which 
the men and women of this great Bureau are spending their 
lives and finding a quiet romance in doing it. I know a man and 
a woman who have spent twenty years or more on the naming 
and classification of grasses alone. I know a man who has for as 
long a time been investigating the eel worms of the soil, and a 
woman who has for years, been studying the bacterial and fungal 
diseases of cucumbers and their relatives ; another who classifies 
and has built up a collection of the leaf diseases of plants, and 
one who is working out the life history of diseases of root crops. 
These botanists are working to accumulate knowledge use- 
ful to you all in the building up of your gardens all over the 
country. They have many of them been here a quarter of a 
century. They are working in rented buildings all over the city. 
They have little or no political power. They have little money. 
Most of them get from $1800 to $3000 a year. The highest salary 
is $6500 for the administration of this work which spends three 
and a half millions and has 2100 employes. 
There is another organization on whose behalf I would 
welcome you, the Washington Botanical Society, with a member- 
ship of 168, of whom at least 90 per cent are professionally 
engaged in the study of plants. They constitute the largest body 
of professional botanists gathered in any one city in the world, 
and that city is the capital of the wealthiest country on earth. 
For years they have been promised a botanical garden, they 
have hoped to see one established, but none has been provided. 
You have done Washington a great honor by coming here and 
I hope that you will be impressed by the beauty of our parks, 
the comfortable appearance of our modest homes, the at- 
titude of service of your public servants and the magnitude of 
the work of discovery in the fields of plants which is going on. 
I have been given the opportunity of building up in this 
great Bureau of Plant Industry, of which my friend, Dr. W. A. 
Taylor is the distinguished chief, the work of searching the 
world for new plants for American farms and gardens, and I 
feel a particular interest in seeing that into every one of your 
beautiful gardens there come as many as possible of the plants 
from foreign lands as you can grow and learn to love. This 
work has been signally profitable to American agriculturists; 
conservatively estimated it has resulted in new crops which 
annually bring over $100,000,000 into the farmers' pockets. Not 
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