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David Fairchild

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David Grandson Fairchild (April 7, 1869 – August 6, 1954) was an American botanist, plant explorer, and author of 4 books.

Quotes

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Exploring for Plants (1930)

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  • To one has seen the vast storehouses of utterly unknown material in the great jungle world below the Tropic of Capricorn, botanizing anywhere in the temperate zone though fascinating is rather lacking in excitement ...
  • Never to have seen anything but the temperate zone is to have lived on the fringe of the world.

The World Was My Garden (1938)

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  • There were five of us children, and the setting of our childhood was quite ideal. The campus of the college was really only a clearing in the great Michigan forest and it contained all of the elements necessary to develop happy, healthy boys and girls. There was a brook teeming with water life; sugar maples to tap when the sap ran fresh in the spring; and great black walnut trees which stood here and there on the campus and were, in some way, my childhood companions. My earliest recollection is of myself as a toddler searching for their nuts in the frosty grass.
  • ... 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 compound fracture, 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 “bacterium,” when my classmate Swingle 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 bacteriology can realize what an amazing thought it seemed when first presented to the world.
    • pp. 8–9
  • In the field of medical science, the advent of the guinea pig and white rat have discredited the “case history” 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.
    • p. 23
  • There were strange contrasts in the little microcosm which then constituted the Department of Agriculture. Some of the men seemed to be relics of a former era, still unaware of the tremendous strides which had taken place in the use of the microscope. In vivid contrast to these fossils, were such men as Theobold Smith, whose laboratory adjoined mine up under the old mansard roof.
    Late one afternoon, long after most of the Department had gone home, I heard Theobold Smith’s light step behind me and his enthusiastic voice calling, “Fairchild, would you like to see the cause of Texas cattle fever?” After months of work, he had just discovered the parasite in a drop of steer’s blood which he had taken from a cattle tick. It was a momentous discovery, the first of its kind.
    I had heard much about the terrific losses of cattle on the plains. Whenever herds of domestic cattle were driven from Texas to the slaughter houses in Chicago and Kansas City, they died by the hundreds if their paths happened to cross a trail made by the longhorn Texas cattle of the plains. Apparently the native Texas cattle were not susceptible to the fever themselves, but were passing it on somehow to their less fortunate brethren.
    • p. 24
  • Waite’s profound research into the nature and cause of the fire blight of the pear 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 Still Pond, Maryland, 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 Bartlett pears, 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.

Garden Islands of the Great East (1943)

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  • As I sit under a giant Ficus tree on my terrace, the setting sun casts long shadows on the grass, and every now and then a yellow leaf falls to the ground. I see in memory the little red figs lying scattered around under a tree at the entrance to a planter’s house far up on the slopes of the volcano Lawoe, in the island of Java, not far from the village of Karang Pandan. Seventeen years ago, Marian and I spent a week-end in a little hotel there, and from the verandah we watched the rain storms come and go, while in the distance the smoking peaks of three volcanoes broke the horizon.
    Karang Pandan was a quiet, solitary place which the Sultan of Djokjakarta had chosen for his summer palace. Although the palace was closed, we could see the Sultan’s favorite lichee tree in the patio, with every bunch of fruits in a little wicker basket that had been woven about it to keep away the flying foxes.
  • I cannot help looking back to those early days spent in Java with a longing which amounts to nostalgia, for the place which seemed a fairyland to a youth in his twenties has acquired a halo to the man in his seventies.
    To a young man interested in nature it was then about the loveliest spot on the entire globe—a fairyland in which the quiet-voiced Javanese came and went softly. You did not hear their bare feet on the roadways; their batik costumes were the colors of autumn leaves that faded into the landscape; their meals of rice and fish and many kinds of vegetables were eaten noiselessly from wooden bowls, without a clatter of china; their thatched houses of bamboo seemed like playthings scattered picturesquely under the palms and mangosteen trees in the tiny kampongs; and the voices of children playing with crickets on the clean-swept dooryards mingled with the cooing of the turtle doves in bamboo cages which hung from the overarching tips of bamboo poles beside the eaves.
    • p. 6

Quotes about David Fairchild

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