The labor world. [volume] (Duluth, Minn.) 1896-current, 1911-06-17
RISKS HIS LIFE |
FOR new Y FOODS !0D'
An Experienced Botanist Who
Has Travelled the Globe in
Search of New Plants.
Has Frogzen and Melted Alterna-
tely AS the Attitudes Have
Changed.

Frank N. Meyer, an American field
explorer, working under commission
of the Bureau Of Plant Industry of the
department of Agriculture, is today in
g lonely land and before his mission
Is ended he will pass through still
lonelier lands. His collecting journey
began at st. Petersburg and it will
end at some coast port In eastern
China.
His trip already has been success
full enough to make it worth much
more than the money it has cost. He
the attitudes have changed; he has
encountered wild beasts and men
nearly as wild; he has scaled glaciers
and crossed chasms of dizzying depths
he has been the subject of the al
ways alert suspicious of government
officials and of strange peoples jeal-
Gus Of intrusions into their land
but he has found what he was sent
for.
A plant hunter! Officials and pea
SAINT are accustomed to the coming
of hunters of wild beasts. They un-
destand the lust of killing and the
desire for danger which make men
take long journeys into strange places
But plant hunter!--it seems to them
the thinnest pretense to hide some
design on the peace of the govern
ment or the community.
The specimen bag must hold some
strange instrument CT destruction, the
more deadly because it is unknown.
The experiences Of botanists in the
eastern mountains, though with an
added element of real danger, are like
those of the peaceful opera glass or
nithologist whose sanity is doubted
and whose arrest is threatened by the
country folk because he prefers to
study the living bird rather than to
kill 1t, fill it with cotton and arsenic,
and to pierce it with wires for mount
ing In painful and srotesque attitude.
Admittedly the expression falls
within the limits Of what the object
ors call the bromides, but 1t is the de-
sire of David Fair:nild, the agricul-
tural explorer in charge, and of his
fellow laborers in field and capital, to-
make such deserts az the United
States has to blossom like the rose or,
If not the rose, the pear, the apple,
the orange, the yomegranate or the
olive. The nature Of much of the
land which is under search today for
plant treasures Is stony and forbid
ding, places apparently for the thistle
and the thorn, and it would appear
that he who looks fer fruitage there
must be one who thinks yea the en-
sWer to the question OF scripture, and
that grapes may be gathered of thorns
and figs of thistles.
The explorer now ir the Himalaya
Mountains carries in his head bo-
tancial chart of the United States. He
finds a species Of plant useful or
ornamental, or a variety of a species,
and by reference to the mental map
he knows instantly in what part of
the United States it has a chance to
flourish and to prove blessing. He
gathers with full knowledge of the
locality in which one day Americans
may sit under the shade of a Him
alaya tree or gather fruit from
Himalayan vine.
In the plant hunters head there is
also weather map. He knows the
sections Of the United States where
long periods of drought would wither
quickly any form of introduced vege-
tation whose life is moisture. He
knows the places where the rainfall is
apt to be excessive and he knows
where there are shadow and sun
shinein about equal parts. His is a
work of selection, and it can be said
that in large part the judgment of
the plant finder has peen justified by
results.-From PLANT Hunter in the
Wilds." in July Technical World
MAGAZINE