President's Annual Address. 85 



the best adapted grape lands of this country, that sound grapes are an exotic 

 hixury upon most tables ; with the numberless fungi and corrupting forces 

 which are continually attacking the plants and the crops which we grow, 

 there is need of a great awakening among hs of a spirit of investigation, and 

 the energetic use of remedies, until we find out how to make and take the 

 necessary measures to make our fruits in reality what they purport to be, 

 something delicious to the eye and delightful to the mouth, instead of repul- 

 sive travesties, worm eaten, scabbed and deformed. 



But whatever success may attend our efforts to conquer the insects and the 

 parasitic diseases which are overwhelming us, there is one great unchangea- 

 ble law governing vegetable growth, the law which sets 



CLIMATIC LIMITS TO ALL GROWING THINGS. 



The earlier experiments in Western horticulture seems to have been made 

 in serene forgetfulness of this primary principle. It has taken some costly 

 experience to convince us that the Baldwin is not a good winter apple in the 

 latitude of 37, or that the Rhode Island Greening is not quite reliable as a 

 market fruit in Iowa and Minnesota. The sharp discipline of many hard 

 winters has taught our orchardists to search for varieties which can bear the 

 severest climates. It is, in fact, not reasonable to suppose that a class of fruits 

 which flourish in the moist and moderate climate of the seaboard States 

 should succeed in the interior of the continent, where all climatic conditions 

 are different and more trying. To the few men who have been working for 

 years to produce and to introduce new kinds with a special adaptation to 

 these extreme conditions, the deepest gratitude of the public is certainly due. 

 I look with the greatest satisfaction and anticipation upon the labors of Prof. 

 Budd, of Iowa, in this most important field. I have no doubt of the correct- 

 ness of his belief that we must have for this great interior plain of the conti- 

 nent entirely different races of fruits from those succeeding nearer the sea. 



THAT MOST INTERESTING POMOLOGICAL JOURNEY 



Of Prof. Budd and Mr. Charles Gibb, of Quebec, through the northeastern 

 portions of Europe, and their researches among the orchards of that ancient 

 and remarkable fruit growing region, seem to throw a new light upon this 

 important problem. I fear that most of us were so ignorant as not to know 

 that one of the most remarkable " fruit belts" on the face of the globe lies be- 

 tween the parallels of oO and 56 in Eastern Russia; and that large and relia- 

 ble crops of apples, pears, cherries and other fruits are annually harvested 

 where the mercury occasionally goes down to 50° or 55° below zero. And 

 that their varieties are so far from degenerating in that region that the same 

 kinds are known to have been in cultivation in the same neighborhoods for 

 several hundred years. If this can be done in a latitude and with a climate 

 corresponding to that about the shores of Hudson's Bay; if scores and hun- 

 dreds of large orchards give annual crops surpassing our best orchard yields 



