The late Sir harry Johnston, with his passion for economic
botany, would have revelled in Mr. Fairchild's Exploring for Plants (Macmillan, 215.), and he would have envied the United States its possession of a Foreign Plant Introduction Department which makes the improvement of American agriculture its sole business. In pursuance of that object—to acquire or discover useful or new plants and to take measure for the acclimatization of them in America—Mr. Fairchild during the years 1925-7 undertook researches in the Barbary States, the Balearics and Grand Canary,"Ceylon and the East Indies, and in West Africa ; and of those researches "the really valuable results are growing up into trees and vines and useful plants, scattered from Panama to the Puget Sound." In Sumatra he notes the cultivation of the West African oil- palm, and speculates as to whether these Eastern plantations may do for palm-oil what they have already done for rubber: Outside the field of botany it must be confessed that the tone of the book and its comments on native life and custom is somewhat flat.
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