STATE HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 223 



western forests are sinking away like the morning dew. According to the essay read, 

 the railroads would be out of ties in just eighteen years, and would have to stop business, 

 as the present stock would last ten years to cut from, and the ties would last eight years 

 longer. This will be the result unless every farmer goes to planting trees for this pur- 

 pose, in order to supply the demand. If this is so, the monopoly question, as far as the 

 railroad question is concerned, is in the hands of the farmers, and they can withhold 

 ties from all the roads that will not come to terms on freights and fares. This may 

 appear to be a new solution of the question, but it looks to me as one having great 

 weight. 



" Some of the speakers did not believe in the ten-year theory ; but we had had two 

 decades of the prophecy, and it had not as yet come to pass ; and such a prospect was in 

 the far-off future — say a thousand or two years — as Illinois to-day had more timber than 

 it had twenty years ago. One is liable to become undecided in the midst of such con- 

 flicting arguments; and, when we were going back to the hotel, I asked Sam what he 

 had thought of it, and if we were really in danger of becoming dried up and going to 

 become a sandy desert, as did the countries mentioned in the essay. Not in the least, he 

 said ; for the old forests may be cut over every thirty or forty years, and the new growth 

 is better than the old. And he suggested our farmers would find that a crop of forest 

 trees, for ties, wagon and implement timber, would be profitable. 



" The evening was wet, and the attendance at the evening session was small. 



" On the second day, Mr. McAfee read a paper on Bud Variation, that made a great 

 deal of talk, and the most of the speakers took a sort of Darwinian view of the subject. 

 I never felt so much like asking questions or making a speech in my life, and, had I 

 been a man, I should have gone in. 



"Just let us look at this kind of talk for a moment, and see where we would drift. 

 According to this theory, the apple, the orange, the peach, the pear, and such like fruit, 

 must have been of the most common kind in the Garden of Eden, and could never have 

 tempted Mrs. Adam as a luxury ; for six thousand years of bud variation, or ' variation 

 from parental forms in vegetable life,' have only made the best of them tolerable, and 

 the books say this has resulted within the past hundred years. Then, what did Adam 

 and Eve do for vegetables and for flowers ? No potatoes, no cabbages, no beets, no 

 onions, no asparagus, or celery; and, as for tomatoes and such like, they had not the 

 least idea. This is queer doctrine for the great State Horticultural Society, to say the 

 least. There had ought to have been a committee of investigation appointed to look 

 into that history, and to report the condition of the fruit crop in Eden, as comparetl with 

 the crops of the present time. If they did not have Baldwins, Greenings, Winesaps, 

 and Willow-Twigs, it is possible that they had varieties just as good, and it is possible 

 that all those valuable sorts were lost in the dark ages. 



" There is a wonderful field of investigation in this direction, that should be looked 

 after; for if garden vegetables are the creation of the market gardener, and flowers of 

 modern florist, and fruits are molded and colored, and made luscious by th(i State Hor- 

 ticultural Societies, we should know it, and thus settle some small matters of history, as 

 well as of vegetable physiology. 



" In some respects, I am glad to have attended this meeting, and in others I am 

 not. To hear these contradictory arguments, one is at a loss to know just where the 

 truth lies ; and to me it is a question if these discussions, after the reading of those heavy 



