I cannot help looking back to those early days spent in with a longing — David Fairchild

"To one has seen the vast storehouses of utterly unknown material in the great jungle world below the , botanizing anywhere in the though fascinating is rather lacking in excitement ..."

"Never to have seen anything but the is to have lived on the fringe of the world."

"... one of my playmates, a boy of my own age, broke his leg while riding in the buggy with his father. His foot slipped from the dashboard and caught in the wheel. It was a , and our family physician shook his shaggy head as he said, “I fear that he cannot live.” The boy’s leg was amputated immediately. Later word came that gangrene had set in. And then the funeral. To the medical profession of those days, a fracture which broke the skin, technically a compound fracture, meant almost certain death. Modern methods of disinfection were still unknown. In fact, it was not until seven years after this that I first heard the word “,” when my classmate painted for me a world filled with bacteria, floating particles in the air, microscopic plants. Only those of us who lived before the days of can realize what an amazing thought it seemed when first presented to the world."

"... this story of the Kampong, Fairchilds home at the edge of the Florida tropics, is ... concerned with ... the introduction and cultivation of the many tropical and exotic fruits which he, as plant explorer extraordinary, had uncovered in his travels around the world. ... It is a readable book, full of reminiscencses and personalities, both plant and man. ... ... Fairchild has the rare faculty of making his readers share his experiences. The numerous photographs add to the book, giving form to the fruits with which he was worked, and the men—, , , and , to name a few—with whom he has been associated."

"Waite’s profound research into the nature and cause of the of the was spectacular and had far-reaching results. He had an incubator full of the pear blight organism, Bacillus amylovorus, and could produce the blight at will by dipping a needle into the culture and inserting it into the growing tip of a pear branch. He believed that bees carried the blight from infected flowers to healthy ones. Doctor Maxwell, a little country doctor of , challenged Waite to prove this on his trees. The results were disastrous! A short time after Waite inoculated the flowers on a few trees, Doctor Maxwell suddenly realized that the bees had spread the blight all over his orchard. He sent a frantic telegram to Washington, but there was little that could be done, for the disease had made such headway that Waite could not stop it. Waite next went South and there made another far-reaching discovery. In an immense orchard of s, the trees mysteriously failed to bear fruit. Waite managed to solve the problem, and returned to Washington in a great state of excitement. His discovery was that the Bartlett pear flower is practically sterile to its own pollen. Hence he found that the only fruit was on trees along the outer edge of the big orchard. He interpreted this phenomenon as indicating that the bees from near-by orchards of other varieties had brought foreign pollen and pollinated the first trees they came to. Basing his experiments on this assumption he proved that it was correct. It was a very real discovery, a precursor of what has now become a generally accepted principle of horticulture, the principle of mixed plantings."

"In the field of medical science, the advent of the and have discredited the “” methods of a generation ago which lacked the factor of controls. The treated patient got well, but where was the untreated one? Maybe that case recovered also. And how about the hereditary set-up of resistance? The value of identical twins as offering material for control in medical experimentation is just beginning to be appreciated."