Foreword


 It is now sixty-one years since my uncle lit the candle in the
North Hall at Ames that I have carried and still carry-the candle
of Plant Introduction. It was in that autumn of 1888 that I came
to stay with my uncle, Dr. Byron D. Halsted, and he taught me
how to grow pollen grains of the long and the short stamens of
the buckwheat flower. Professor Buel was still alive and I, a
boy of scarce 19, used to listen to his quaint accounts of how
the Russian apples were introduced. I really began my career
in this North Hall on the campus of the Iowa State Agricultural
College, although I graduated from the Kansas State Agricultural
College of which my father was president.
 I see myself tagging my uncle in the fields and prairies of
Iowa or listening to my aunt as she played Beethoven's sonatas
in the little red brick house there on the campus. That was
sixty-one years ago. Sixty-one years of romantic life-with useful
plants always as the golden thread that ran through it all.
 I think youths of this new era will get from reading this book
the notion that to "work" with plants as the Plant Introducers
have done is not really work at all but intense interest-absorp-
tion, in a world that lives and changes every instant of time.
 This account presents the facts as they have come down in
stories and personal narratives relating to the first arrivals of
foreign crops in the United States. The author has distributed
credit for these first introductions and it seems to be the instinct
of human beings to accord credit to whoever is first to do a thing,
no matter how many people took part in the later development
of that thing-be it a crop or an invention. But we cannot
overlook those persons who sent in foreign seeds that had promise
of proving valuable as additions to the varieties or species of