STATE HORTICULTUBAL SOCIETY. 205 



I say chiefly will your success depend on conunon sense, but not altogether; for 

 there will always be some local or accidental causes which will operate to your dis- 

 advantage. But with the greater health of your trees, you will be astonished how 

 they will improve. It is remarkable how people will declaim against climate and 

 everything else but their own ignorance of first principles with the facts directly 

 against them. You have no doubt heard men say their locality would not grow 

 grapes, when if they would go to the nearest wood, where by the shade of the neigh- 

 boring branches, or the abundance of other trees about it, the roots were tolerably 

 dry, cool and shaded, a grape vine would wander in profuse luxuriousness. Or 

 apples, perhaps, would not do now as formerly they would, while in the nearest 

 neglected fence corner, where perhaps a specimen has got into a patch of blackberries 

 or elders, whose branches keep the fallen leaves together to rot for food, and shady, to 

 let the roots reap the advantage from the fortunate circumstances, you may find an 

 apple tree in vigorous health and loaded with fruit Tears, peaches, raspberries, 

 gooseberries, currants — all tell the self-same story. I will venture to say that I will go 

 into any part of the United States, and wherever I go point out to you specimens 

 which have got somehow out of the I'uts of what is sarcastically called good cultivation, 

 and into some happy spot where they can pusli forth theii* roots on a rich, cool, 

 shaded, and regularly humid surface, that you will say with me, that you have the 

 best soil and climate in the world for fruit-culture— a perfect paradise of good mate- 

 rials; and that if you fail it is not the fault of this Elysian field, hut of your own 

 Inability to use wisely the tree of knowledge, of good and evil. 



There is yet another principle of fruit culture worth considering, which has a great 

 influence on success . In practice it would come under the head of the use of the hnife. 



Let us begin at the beginning of plant life. You know that plants are made up of 

 single cells, which, uniting together, make up the various forms we see. We have a 

 fashion of talking about the lowest forms of life of plants and animals as well. Now 

 these lowest forms are nothing but single cells, which perform every function of 

 nutrition and propagation within themselves. Can you imagine that in these little 

 floating cells are beings like ourselves— like these majestic trees which we see every- 

 wdiere about usl' Yet by the latest researches in science there is little doubt but that 

 in these simple forms every function and every attribute exists that rinds a home in the 

 highest aggregated forms. They have their loves and their hates, their hungers and 

 their thirsts, their love of life and their dread of death, as much as any of us. This 

 fact cannot be appreciated by our senses, but by inductive reasoning there is little 

 doubt of its truth. The whole cannot be greater than its parts ; what it possesses it 

 receives from them. These cells, having all the functions of large aggregates, find that 

 they are to go into situations where they cannot protect themselves against the elements 

 and other enemies, and they join together for mutual aid and defense, just as indi- 

 viduals do when they proceed to form a strong central government. Rights and 

 functions which in their highest individualized conditions they enjoyed, they now 

 sacrifice for the good of the whole. It is exactly the same with these cells. Those of 

 animal nature each give up their little breathing organs, digestive apparatus, circu- 

 lating mediums and so forth, and concentrate them in one central, governing part of 

 the organic form; and thus the motion which we can see in animals, the taste, smell, 

 touch hearing, and all the faculties which they possess, are but the total sums of the 

 single contributions of millions of cells. Is it not wonderful , when we contemplate 



