THE SECRETARY'S PORTFOLIO. 417 



be astonished at the result. It will be only a season or two before the child, 

 still but a youth, can go alone and intelligently in this matter of cultivation. 

 A great aid in addition to his love of knowledg', his instinct of proprietorship, 

 and his desire for something to do. is to have a practical end in view. Some 

 children love best to have the flower^ appreciated for home decoration ; some 

 that they may use or furnish them to decorate the church, some to supply 

 friends, some to sell. The same is true of iiuits and vegetables. Study the 

 character of the child, and use those means for help and encouragement which 

 will best subserve that end. Enjoy the beauty and the fragrance it that will 

 prove the best stimulus; purchase of him radishes, melons or cauliflowers, as 

 you would of your grocer, if that will best keep him at the work. Let the 

 pickles, and the catsup, the canned strawberries and raspberries be the product 

 of his garden. We mistake, and dwarf the capabilities of many a young horti- 

 culturist by putting this subject wholly within the range of sentiment. Work 

 ofttimes grows in importance and interest if its proceeds help to gratify little 

 wants. The time will come, and soon, when we will not need to dwell so 

 strongly upon this matter of encouragement. When this form of labor has 

 become popularized, and it has become the fashion for every boy or girl to 

 cultivate a piece of ground, we may simply luruish information, aud its appli- 

 cation will be readily made. As a hastening of this glad time, encourage 

 enthusiasm. The bursting bud, the opening blossom, the ripening Iruit, are 

 each an inspiration. Its spirit stirs within the child ; help him to a conscious 

 understanding of it. 



THE FUTURE OF MICHIGAN AS A FRUIT GROWING STATE. 



BY T. T. LYON". 



During a residence of fifty-four years in Michigan we have seen the dense 

 forests which, at the first, clothed alm.ost its entire surface, opening northward 

 from year to year; and we have also at the same time felt the stealthy tread of 

 the more fitful or paroxysmal climate of the prairie regions as it entered upon 

 attack, apparently a lasting possesson of the delbliated regions. 



We have, co-extensively with this denuding process, seen the more tender 

 fruits which seemed at home under the sheltering aegis of the primitive forests 

 slowly give way under the influence of this duplex process ; keeping pace in an 

 apparently unnatural movement northward, with the decadence or disapear- 

 ance of the forests. 



More recently we have watched the developments of a '•' fruit belt,"' along the 

 borders of our circumscribing lakes, with the expectation that, since these 

 grand bodies of water, unlike our forests, cannot be swept away, and, by their 

 destruction, be made to minister to the insatiable greed of business and com- 

 merce, the climatic advantages they offered might be considered as permanent. 

 A more full and intimate consideration of the case has, however, led us to the 

 conviction that even this conclusion must be accept; d with many grains of 

 allowance ; since the desirableness of the land near the lake, for fruit growing 

 as for farming, is rapidly inducing the destruction of the timber, a process 

 Avhich is rapidly spreading inland. It is doubtless the fact, that the disadvant- 

 ages growing out of this clearing up of the lake shore region are, climatically 



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