Fruit Culture in Minnesota. 99 



trees. He must feel hurt when they suffer, and guilty when he neglects 

 them. Nothing but love for his trees will give him this feeling. 



*• I would like to look through your orchard," I said to a German farmer 

 several years ago. as I was driving by his house. I had just passed by his 

 orchard, and noted the clean ground, the smooth, healthy look of the trees, 

 their orderly and well-kept expression. "Come in, I will show you." "How 

 nicely your orchard looks," I said, as he was pointing out the different sorts 

 and telling me their names, "Oh, yes," he ve^Wed," I love my trees!" The 

 words were few, but such as they were— with the man's own expression of 

 countenance — and another glance of mine up and down the rows of his pets, 

 they gave me a good, long lesson that will never be forgotten. 



Adaptation: This is too great a question to discuss in this paper. There 

 is, first and foremost, climatic adaptation ; and this is something that seems 

 to require centuries for its growth. That we must look beyond our own 

 country for present success in selections of races adajjted here is evident, 

 from the fact that nowhere else in America where apples have been grown 

 is there any such climate in reference to summer and winter temperature, 

 dryness of air and the peculiarities of rainfall, all taken together. That we 

 can find this adaptation in some of the older countries abroad and transplant 

 it here, is indicated by the further fact that all of the sorts now growing and 

 showing adaptation to Minnesota climate are traceable to an origin in those 

 countries abroad where there are similar climatic conditions. We have the 

 history of the Duchess of Oldenburg. Thig variety was obtained by Thomas 

 Andrew Knight, President of the London Horticultural Society, towards the 

 close of the last century, with forty other sorts sent him by the British engi- 

 neers, who were employed by the Russian government in the improvement 

 of navigation on the Volga river. It afterwards went to France. There they 

 dropped its Russian name of Borovinka and called it by its present name, 

 and from thence it came to Canada and thence down the Atlantic coast and 

 across the river St. Lawrence and everywhere over North America. It never 

 attracted pre-eminent attention over many other sorts until it came into 

 those parts where its Russian adaptation to extreme cold, extreme heat and 

 extreme aridity of air and dry soil singled it out as the one only reliable va- 

 riety. Knight made many crosses with his Russian apple trees. They, too, 

 have gone over the Western world. When we see a negro, we know he is 

 from Africa, wherever he was horn, as we call one of the later processes in in- 

 dividual life; when we see a mulatto we recognize his African blood, and so 

 it is with Russian trees. The expert student sees their blood in form of tree 

 and branches, in buds, in flowers, in leaves and fruit, and their crosses can 

 never be hidden till they fade down by division and by prepotency of other 

 sorts beyond the reach of the senses to distinguish them. In fact, we have 

 found out almost enough already to declare whenever we hear of a previously 

 unknown sort having done well through a period of seven or eight years, 

 without seeing it, "it is a Russian." Our Minnesota Wealthy, now celebra- 

 ted as a profitiible apple for the North, passes, by the tests of botanical science, 



