ITHACA, N.Y., Dec. 26--Dr. Liberty Hyde Bailey, internationally renowned botanist, horticulturist and agricultural educator, died yesterday in his home here at the age of 96. Traveled 250,000 Miles Dr. Bailey's activities, some of which continued after he was 90, included writing more than fifty books, editing many more, traveling more than 250,000 miles to collect more than 275,000 plants, classifying thousands of plants, heading many societies, including the American Association for the Advancement of Science, writing poetry and lecturing. Lively and strong-minded, Dr. Bailey thought nothing at 91 of making a trip to the West Indies to search for palms. He did that in April, 1949. A huge birthday party planned for him by Cornell University--he was dean emeritus of its College of Agriculture--had to be postponed because he was wandering through the jungles. Dr. Bailey told the International Congress of Plant Sciences at its meeting in New York in 1926 that man's conquest of the plant kingdom was in its infancy; that in the extension of knowledge of plants and the ability to use them lay one of the great hopes of the human race. One of his greatest achievements was collecting in China, South America, New Zealand, the West Indies and elsewhere more than 200,000 plants for the Bailey Hortorium, which, with one of the world's largest collections of plant lore as well as of plants, he presented to Cornell in 1935. Two other achievements were editing the four-volume Cyclopedia of American Agriculture and similar work on the six-volume Standard Cyclopedia of Horticulture. Inheritance From Father Born on March 15, 1858, in South Haven, Mich., he was the son of a man of the same name and Mrs. Sarah Harrison Bailey. The senior Liberty Bailey, it was said, "tramped all the way from Vermont, carrying fruit trees for the West," a veritable Johnny Appleseed. His son won in 1948 the first award of the Johnny Appleseed Memorial Medal from the Men's Garden Clubs of America. Dr. Bailey was reared in Michigan on land cleared of forests by his father. The family farmed the tract, and made its own soap and candles, tanned its leather, wove its cloth and fought off bears. In Dr. Bailey's book, "The Nature Study Idea," he related that as a boy he collected stones and plants, hatched snake eggs in his mother's oven and made notes on the weather. In his teens he planned his life, including twenty-five years of study, twenty-five for practicing a vocation and the remainder for doing what he most enjoyed. He stuck fairly close to that plan. In later years he did much to improve rural life by scientific means. He did some newspaper work as a youth, was graduated from Michigan Agricultural College in 1882 and thereafter received an M.S. from his alma mater and doctorates from the Universities of Wisconsin, Alfred, Vermont and Puerto Rico. Assistant to Dr. Asa Gray, Harvard botanist, in the early Eighteen Eighties, Dr. Bailey was later Professor of Horticulture and Landscape Gardening at Michigan Agricultural College for three years until he became Professor of Horticulture at Cornell in 1888. In 1903 he became dean of the College of Agriculture at Cornell, resigning in 1913. Won Many Awards At Michigan in 1885 he had organized the first college department of horticulture and landscape gardening in the country. That same year his "Field Notes on Apple Culture," a small illustrated volume, won for him the first of many awards, that of the American Pomological Society's Wilder Medal. Most of his books were technical, but some, like "The State and the Farmer," published in 1908, the year he became chairman of President Theodore Roosevelt's Country Life Commission, were intended to improve rural conditions. He declined an offer in 1911 of the State Commissionership of Agriculture and the next year deflated a boom to have him become Progressive candidate for Governor. Until the end, he frequently was showered with honors. He believed one should accept conditions as they were, not let money be the primary consideration, but keep as a chief aim the artistic expression of life. His ideas were expressed in "The Holy Earth," "Wind and Weather," "What Is Democracy?" and other books. A widower, he leaves a daughter, Miss Ethel Zoe Bailey of Ithaca.