FLORIDA STATE HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY 
17 
read to you one of the last letters of that 
early pioneer, Prof. Gale, which he wrote 
to me. after, for the third time, his Mul- 
goba mango (the only tree in America) 
had been killed to the ground. I asked 
him if he wasn’t discouraged and he came 
back with that optimism which seems to 
be characteristic of the old fighting 
American stocks of eighty years, saying 
that now he felt convinced that Mango 
growing was going to be an industry in 
South Florida. I think of that letter 
when I see thousands of budded Hayden 
mangos and hear the. accounts of big 
profits from single trees which were 
made last year. 
But I have a more serious undertaking 
than would be indicated by such examples 
as the Mulgoba mango. These are days 
when the question of a food supply is up¬ 
permost in people’s minds, particularly 
the minds of the legislators. 
I sat one afternoon in the woods of 
Maryland with Mr. Hoover. It was just 
after the crisis had been passed with re¬ 
gard to our supply of quinine and we had 
suddenly realized that Holland had a 
complete monopoly of that indispensable 
drug. I was tremendously interested in 
Mr. Hoover’s conception of the growing 
importance of the tropical food supply 
and of the speed with which other coun¬ 
tries were pushing into them in search of 
the vast wealth which lies in those vege¬ 
table oils which every year in immense 
quantities can be produced there. His 
long experience in tropical countries has 
made him realize their tremendous po¬ 
tentiality and I shall miss my guess if he 
does not bring into a prominence which 
few here realize the great future for 
Americans in its exploitation. 
The discovery of a use for a tropical 
raw material is the first step in its ex¬ 
ploitation is it not? How are new uses 
discovered? By the action of those in¬ 
tellects which through experience in a 
certain field have come to know what is 
needed in that field, in another way. The 
presence of the intellects is as necessary 
as the presence of the raw material and 
here is where Florida comes in. She has 
the people. She has coming here every 
winter hundreds of thousands of people 
who spend their lives in close touch with 
the most specialized industries in Amer¬ 
ica. Men who have made their fortunes 
by discoveries. These men are scatter¬ 
ing out all over the country getting the 
only kind of rest which such men take— 
a change of interest. Why is it unreas¬ 
onable to suppose that with the bringing 
in around them of all sorts of these trop¬ 
ical plants their attention should be at¬ 
tracted to their possibilities, and out of 
their interest in them come the develop¬ 
ment of a demand for them which will 
extend into the tropics and lead to a great 
tropical industry? 
These things do not seem so specula¬ 
tive to me as they perhaps would had I 
not stood with Ridley in his first little 
plantation of Para rubber and caught in 
a mustard tin the latex which hardened 
into an eraser which I still use and which 
every time I do use it reminds me of the 
fact that since I caught that juice over 
500,000 acres have been planted to that 
tree, many coming from seeds from that 
very tree; and that after supplying every 
motor car with a tire the juice is still 
