Society of America and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. To those high honors the Fourth International Botanical Congress, held in Ithaca in August 1926, added another. He was made president and presiding chairman of the congress. The only other American who had received this worldwide recognition was his early mentor Asa Gray. A year later, in 1927, the renowned publication of Kew Gardens and the Royal Horticultural Society of England, Curtis's Botanical Magazine, dedicated volume 153 to Bailey ''in recognition of his long devotion to the scientific training of workers in horticulture and agriculture and to the increase and spread of knowledge in these branches of science.''⁵

Bailey's long list of honors, however, is remarkable less for its great length than for the breadth of the fields of study represented in it. Few scientists have equaled this record.

Bailey's writing, which spanned eighty-one years, is almost incredible. Between 1890 and 1940 he edited for Macmillan 117 titles by 99 authors covering subjects in agronomy, economics, botany, pomology, animal husbandry, dairy industry, soils and fertilizers, plant pathology, commercial floriculture, and home economics. Carol Woodward, editor of Outdoor Books for Macmillan, wrote that no English writer "has had that refined combination of botanical and horticultural knowledge that Bailey made his own."⁶ Bailey himself wrote some sixty-five books and a large number of the individual items in the several large encyclopedias that he edited. His successor as director of the Bailey Hortorium, George H. M. Lawrence, estimated that he wrote at least 1,300 articles published in the world's periodical literature and over 100 papers in pure taxonomy. Curtis Page, husband of Bailey's granddaughter, has written that