16 
FLORIDA STATE HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY 
would have it. It was willing to pay 
money for it and the satisfying of this 
demand has had a greater influence on 
tropical horticulture than almost anything 
else since the discovery of the uses of the 
juice of the rubber tree. 
As our fathers and mothers were in at 
the beginning of the banana so we here 
today are. standing at the threshold of an¬ 
other tropical industry which in magni¬ 
tude may in the lifetime of some here ri¬ 
val that of the banana itself. I refer to 
the avocado. 
But there are many who will talk here 
of that remarkable fruit and I shall only 
allude to it to help me prove what I start¬ 
ed out to prove to you—that the pioneer 
work in tropical horticulture is here, and 
not somewhere off in the sweltering, 
malaria-infested lowlands, or even on the 
isolated, inaccessible slopes of some, trop¬ 
ical volcano, alluring as those places most 
certainly are to the collector and the lab¬ 
oratory research man. 
If the tropics is the place where, trop¬ 
ical horticulture will develop why is it 
that there is not a single large orchard of 
budded avocados anywhere in the West 
Indies or Central America whereas there 
are hundreds of acres of them here? 
But someone will say I have chosen 
as an example a fruit with which Califor¬ 
nia has done more than Florida, which 
is true. But my explanation of the rea¬ 
son is that California has had the wealth 
and the people. 
But let us take a more strictly tropical 
species, the mango, and see what the sit¬ 
uation there is. It is one of the most 
highly prized fruits of India. I have dis¬ 
cussed its varieties with the wealthiest 
Parsee of that vast country, sitting in his 
marble palace as he gave me the, promise 
of plants of his best sorts. Its culture 
there is centuries old and the Mahrad Jas 
fostered its cultivation and built up vari¬ 
ety collections, but they did little to study 
its diseases and nothing which we can 
discover to produce by careful breeding 
and selection the finest varieties of which 
the species is capable. No such question 
as that of the best stock on which to graft 
or bud it had been worked out and even 
the old and expensive system of inarching 
was the only known method of its propa¬ 
gation in vogue there. With millions of 
square miles of territory where giant 
mango trees could be grown in the tropics 
of the Western Hemisphere was it not to . 
be expected that there would have devel¬ 
oped orchards of the finest varieties to 
be found in India? Varieties without 
any fiber which could be eaten as easily 
as a canteloupe? We have searched the 
tropics of South America and Central 
America in vain. The finest mango of 
Brazil (Mango de. Rosa) is too full of 
fiber to merit classing as even a fair va¬ 
riety. The call has come in from these 
countries for the fine Florida mangos 
such as that remarkable seedling, the 
Hayden, than which there is none ap¬ 
proaching it in commercial character, and 
thousands of budded plants of these and 
our imported varieties have been sent into 
the western tropics. 
Some of you perhaps know the strug¬ 
gle which resulted in the saving of the 
mother of the Hayden, the Mulgoba. It 
would be hard to imagine such a struggle 
and such patience over a new variety of 
fruit inside the tropics. 1 wish I could 
