20 
FLORIDA STATE HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY 
for it and built up a big business with it ? 
I cannot imagine it. The introduction of 
the delicious M;ulgoba and other fiber¬ 
less sorts and their further improvement 
in the Hayden is what is acquainting the 
great American public with the excellen¬ 
cies of that incomparably delicious fruit. 
And when Americans once really go after 
the mango and it becomes a million-dol- 
lar industry, its beginnings will trace 
right back to the shores of Lake Worth 
and Biscayne Bay, just as the first days 
of the grapefruit, which is today as much 
talked about in France as the banana was 
a generation ago, were spent here in the 
south tip of Florida. 
Why, I once had the pleasure on a rail¬ 
way Pullman of presenting a Florida- 
grown mango of a variety which the 
great Parsee Tatta had given me, to the 
millionaire of Cleveland who had escorted 
Tatta through this country when he vis¬ 
ited America. He had volunteered the 
remark that he had been through India 
and he considered the mango a much 
over-rated fruit. He opened and ate the 
Florida-grown Amini mango and de¬ 
clared, as any honest man would, “I must 
never have eaten a good one.” 
Most of the objection in the minds of 
the public to what they call tropical fruit 
is to poor seedling varieties of it. Over 
half of those who don’t like them have 
never eaten the selected superior types of 
those fruits which you pioneers are bring- 
into existence through your art. We can¬ 
not blame the. public so long as we give 
them only rank flavored seedlings, and 
when we once give them the best of their 
kinds they will come after them with the 
money fast enough. 
It is in a very real sense then that you 
are the pioneers of tropical horticulture, 
for it is to you that a public of a hun¬ 
dred millions is looking for the perfection 
of these bewiilderingly fascinating new 
forms of plants which inhabit the great 
forests and savannahs of the tropical 
zone. 
So those who have come here to live, 
should let nobody belittle the mission of 
Florida. To look upon what you do here 
as affecting only a narrow sand spit— 
a sand bar as it were out into the Gulf 
of Mexico—is to forget that what you 
do here to improve the plants and popu¬ 
larize them affects the whole American 
consuming public by creating a demand 
which, as our population increases, will 
draw first on Florida soils and later on 
the whole available tropics. 
Is it not worth while to teach a hun¬ 
dred million people to like a fruit which 
can be grown cheaply over millions of 
acres of inexhaustible volcanic lands 
where the sunlight and moisture make the 
fruiting of it a perpetual performance? 
Is it nothing to so improve a fruit or 
nut or vegetable that its use by a great 
people is made possible and its culture 
stimulated in regions which never could 
have been devoted to the cultivation of 
the wild form of it? 
Is it nothing to build up a body of 
trained and enthusiastic men and women 
from which will be recuited those who, 
as opportunity comes, will go out into 
the wider strictly tropical field prepared 
to accomplish something worth while be¬ 
fore the malaria and other diseases pull 
them down to that dead level of exist¬ 
ence which almost every white resident 
