The Twentieth Century


cherry trees were brought from Russia for the Northwest, and
an entirely new fruit-producing vine, the yang-taw from central
China, was presented to the Department by Consul Wilcox of
Hankow. About two hundred peach varieties with unusual cold
resistance were received from the Caucasus in 1944.
 The Jordan Almond was successfully introduced in 1903 in
California. Although almond crops of several million pounds
were then being produced in California, the quality was so
inferior to the Jordan of Spain that large quantities of nuts
were imported annually. In 1906, 6,000 trees of the pistache, a
green-fleshed nut used in coloring and flavoring confections, were
sent to experimenters, and new varieties from the Turkestan
and North China were introduced. Hardy wild stocks were being
secured and studied for use as rootstocks at the same time, and
Kearney secured the best almonds from Italy. Later Meyer was
to find many types in Asia, but progress has been slow for this
crop in America.
 Potatoes-L. R. Jones, an explorer commissioned to go to
Europe in 1905, collected ninety potato varieties on the Con-
tinent. In the same year, four varieties from the higher altitudes
of Ecuador were sent to the United States by the Minister of
Commerce and Agriculture of Ecuador, and an Uruguayan vari-
ety also was brought in. The Department received seventy-two
varieties from Chile in 1909 to be used in breeding blight-resist-
ance and potatoes for dry-land farming. Explorations in the
Andes of Peru and Bolivia in 1913 secured over 250 sorts of
wild and cultivated potatoes and proved this region to be the
native home of the Irish potato. Four explorers, Donald Reddick,
C. O. Erlanson, Paul Russell, and M. J. Souviron, searching for
wild and cultivated potatoes in 1930 in Mexico, made collections
for breeding resistance to blight and cold. Corn from Central
America secured for acclimitization in 1906 behaved very erratic-
ally in the new, northerly environment.
 Matting-Agriculturists were concerned at the turn of the
century with the fact that $4 million worth of matting materials
had to be imported yearly because there was no competitive
native crop. Growers in South Carolina wanted a substitute crop
for their rice fields which could no longer compete with the
rice fields in Texas and Louisiana. The Department of Agricul-
ture sent John H. Tull to Japan in 1906 to study the industry
and secure plants. Attempts to introduce rushes two years earlier