April, ’23] 
BEATTIE: IMPORTANT PLANT DISEASES 
151 
The stories that you may have heard about the great delays in our 
inspection house are without foundation. At the time the alleged delays 
were occurring, it was the expressmen’s strike in New York City that 
made the trouble—and we were, of course, getting the blame. 
The facts of the case are that many of the shipments, even large 
ones, go out of the inspection house the same day they are received, 
and practically all except the very largest go out by the next day. 
There are occasional shipments that cannot be worked in that 
length of time, but they are always worked promptly. We are 
handling the shipments by the very best methods that we know. 
Many nurserymen tell us that the packing we give to the material 
is far better than that given to it originally in the foreign country. 
Some of the foreign packing is awful. If we couldn’t give better 
packing than the foreign shipper sometimes does we ought to go 
out of business. 
We are developing some very interesting comparisons between 
foreign and domestic methods of packing. Some of the nurserymen 
with the best reputations abroad are the poorest packers, and some 
with less of a reputation pack better. Some countries pack better 
than others. We are learning these things, because now propagating 
material is going through one funnel where the various lots are coming 
side by side. Instead of assembling the information from forty- 
eight different groups of inspectors, one group of men now see prac¬ 
tically everything in propagating material which enters the country. 
We are photographing these things and keeping records of them. 
We are eliminating pests wherever it is possible to eliminate them, 
and if we can’t eliminate them, then the material is excluded. 
Mr. R. Kent Beattie: Let me digress and say in closing that in 
the last year I have had the privilege of meeting with the group of 
men represented by Mr. Rockwell, in New York City and again in 
Detroit. There is no group of men in the United States who are 
more in sympathy with our work as inspectors than these producers 
of plants. They are not men who are jobbing plants, but they are 
growing plants and selling them, and I bespeak for Mr. Rockwell the 
most cordial sympathy of this organization because there is a unani¬ 
mous feeling among these producers that we are their friends and 
are doing everything we can to help them and that they wish to 
co-operate with us. If there are any methods of protection that we 
can furnish which will help the nurserymen, they want them. They 
do not want to increase their risks. 
