go STATE POMOLOGICAL SOCIETY. 



should have suggested this to me before and I would have 

 shown him how he could avoid a very serious pitfall. 



I was interested in some of the figures and deductions which 

 he has drawn from his first year's experience. He will have a 

 number more. In my planting operations my cost exceeded his 

 the first year. It cost me about seven cents a tree to plant some 

 thousands of trees; but the second year we reduced it to his 

 minimum price. I see he is progressing in that, in one year, he 

 approximated my minimum. If he keeps on he will forge 

 ahead. But I think in the progress of his practical researches 

 his lecture room doctrines will very likely be modified to some 

 extent. 



Seriously it is a privilege, I think, for you ladies and gentle- 

 men to have a man of this type come and talk to you of the 

 things that he is doing in the field of commercial orcharding. 

 We teachers have so constantly to draw from the experience 

 of others — as I shall do tonight — and from the field of theory, 

 that it must grow rather tiresome for the practical man, and 

 when on the top of that we are often so cock sure as to how to 

 answer the questions of the practical man, we spoil confidence 

 and destroy our own usefulness. 



THE SURVEY. 



I shall show you tonight some slides which illustrate average 

 experiences, more valuable than any particular experience that 

 we could describe. 



Human experience in lines of scientific research is of two 

 kinds — first, the discovery of new truth, in the laboratory 

 ordinarily ; second, the rediscovering of old facts. We are con- 

 stantly discovering, or rediscovering, old facts, and we occa- 

 sionally discover some things which are new. Many of the 

 things which we think are new are not so very recent after 

 all. For instance, Prof. Sears tells us about using beans as a 

 cover crop and we rather plume ourselves on the notion that this 

 is a modern practice, that we have just discovered that the 

 whole great family of legumes are valuable plants in farm 

 practice because they capture a relatively large amount of nitro- 

 gen. Now if we were to go back to some of those old books — 

 I was reading an old book the other day, the author of which 



