WINTER MEETING. 217 



lion. Tliey have assured me that all we have to do is to tell them 

 what we need to carry on our work for the next two years, and they 

 will help us get it. In other words, we have added to our list of 

 friends the St. Louis people, and we feel sure that they are good 

 friends and will help us get what our cause demands. 



Now, then, we can do no less than commit ourselves to the task 

 of doing more and better things nexi year than this, and we ask our 

 Society to stand by this work as one of the best means of '"letting our 

 light shine." No other state society takes the lead that we do, and no 

 other state society ever thinks of making such an attempt to show 

 fruits as we do, and I may safely say that no other society or state 

 gets more or better advertising than our Society is doing for our 

 State. 



THE FUTURE WORK OF THE SOCIETY. 



While it cannot be my province to lay down a fixed plan of pro- 

 cedure for the future, yet I may safely say that the great aim of the 

 Society has been, from its beginning, and especially during the last 

 twelve years, to get our people to think, to study, to act and to ex- 

 periment intelligently, to awaken in the minds of our fruit-growers a 

 thirst for more knowledge, and to get our people united and active in 

 this wonderful development which we see opening up before us. If 

 we fail in all else which we undertake, and only succeed in this last, I 

 feel sure that the iniiuence of the Society will be felt and success will 

 crown her efforts. But we want to increase our influence, our teaching 

 ability, our means of communicating knowledge to the people; we are 

 desirous of getting the experience of hundreds of the fruit men of our 

 State, and we want our people to read and act upon it; we want the 

 number of our reports increased to double the number, and we want 

 the appropriation increased, so as to make this possible. We want the 

 means so that we can hold meetings once every three months, if need 

 be, instead of twice each year. 



We want the means to hire and send a man with the State Board 

 of Agriculture to every institute, and to hold institutes of our own 

 for the fruit-grower. 



We would like to publish these proceedings at the end of each 

 three months, and thus have them issued as a quarterly and mailed at 

 once to all who wish them, and at the end of each year combine them 

 in book form. We believe that we could do much good this way. We 

 want to get statistics of the number of acres of orchards, age of each, 

 varieties, probable yield, number of acres in bearing and not bearing, 

 condition of trees, ground, weather and prospect of crop, each and 

 'every month from January 1 to October 1, when we should have are- 



