This is not a treatise on the orange.  The title, On the Trail of the Orange, was chosen because nearly fifty years of my life have been devoted to studies on the orange.  The years not so spent were largely years of training in preparation for such work.  The supplemental title, The Autobiography of an Ordinary Man, also needs little explan­ation.  It is certain that I can be graded only an ordinary man.  I have not been elected to the National Academy, or to the presidency of any national society.  I have never won fame through any act of heroism or any erudite discovery.  I have, however, by long hours of hard work achieved sufficient success to provide the necessities for my family and to permit me to work on subjects in which I have been interested.  What more can any ordinary man expect from life?

The biographies available in our libraries are almost invariably those of outstanding men who have made notable contributions to human welfare.  This is as it should be, but must it then be considered that the lives of ordinary men are drab and uneventful?  Should not people in general be led to consider more commonly the interesting events and opportunities that occur in the lives of ordinary men, which are more likely to follow the pattern of the life to which the common may aspire?  This is the thought which has led me to prepare this narrative and is my apology for its presentation.

The purpose of this publication, thus, primarily is to relate certain interesting incidents and scientific stories, along with just enough personal data to tie the narrative together into a freely running text.  The manu­script was largely written in my eightieth and eighty-first years, but the incidents and stories related are vivid in my memory and certainly in all essentials are accurate accounts.

Herbert John Webber

Riverside, California
August 8, 1945





III    COLLECTING TRIPS

IV    AT WOODS HOLE

V     LIFE AND WORK IN FLORIDA

VI    FLORIDA SINKHOLES

VII   EXPLORING THE SWEET GUM CAVE and CRUISE AMONG THE FLORIDA KEYS

VIII  THE SEXUAL LIFE OF THE COONTIE PLANT OR ZAMIA

IX    SNAKE STORIES




Ed. note: This manuscript is an unfinished autobiography by our great grandfather Herbert John Webber. Webber appears to have started work on the his autobiography in his eighth decade, weaving together personal recollections and bits from his scientific writings.  The text covers his early years up to about 1901 including his work in Florida and research leading to his Ph.D., but he was not able to finish.* 

There is a lot more to Webber's story; in the four-plus decades that followed, he worked for the USDA in Washington, DC, as a professor of plant breeding at Cornell, as director of the Citrus Experimental Station at Riverside, and as director of the California Agricultural Experiment Station in Berkeley before retiring to Riverside.  All told Webber wrote more than 250 papers, and a book from 1943 that he co-edited, The Citrus Industry, is still cited to this day (>).  The early chapters are a bit of a slow read at times, the botanical sections, in which figures are referenced but not available here, are dense, but other sections are quite interesting. 

To produce this online version, I started with photocopied pages of the manuscript.  Miguel scanned the document.  OCR on the scans did not do a great job; some of the copies were a bit faint and the Courier typeface also caused problems resulting in a lot of incorrect or missing characters, introduced spaces and so forth.  In addition to cleaning up these many points, I also made minor edits, particularly breaking up some very long paragraphs, and spelling. 

Eric M. Appleman
Pacific Palisades, California
July 2021


*An excerpt from May 11, 1970 letter from our grandmother Irma E. Webber to Earl and Lura provides a bit of background:

...I have recently had some correspondence with the director of the Hunt Botanical Library (Carnegie-Mellon University) which has as one of its projects the permanent preservation of photographs, correspondence, and original manuscripts of botanists in an institution where such source material will be available for study by botanists, historians, biographers or other scholars dealing with plants and advancement of plant sciences.  The question has arisen as to the whereabouts of the original manuscript of the autobiography your father was writing at the time of his death, and also botanical correspondence other than that retained in official files.

You probably remember that it was father's wish that I would finish this biography in the event that he couldn't.  Since it was an autobiography and only a few chapters were finished, it was agreed by the family that it would be impossible for me or anyone else to complete a book on your father's recollections.  Before I completely abandoned the idea of trying a less valuable, different type of biography I assembled the original manuscript of the autobiography, the family guest book, some large slides (glass), a little correspondence etc. in a cardboard carton.  We kept this box until about ten years ago when we gave it to Fera for keeping..."