STATE POMOLOGICAL S0CIE;TY. 177 



raise them or you will go out of the fruit business. And I am 

 sorry to say that the American family is not producing as much 

 as it ought to; it isn't producing the right number per family 

 that it ought to today. And that is a crop that you have got to 

 raise. Now I say this in the interests of horticulture and pomol- 

 ogy, and I hope that you will raise a good crop of children in 

 the State of Maine as well as a good crop of Northern Spies and 

 Baldwins. 



Edwin H. Buri^ingame, R. I. Horticultural Society, Provi- 

 dence, R. I. 



I am here from a small state and I don't think anybody needs 

 to be told that a state, — well it hardly equals territorially some 

 of your counties, it don't equal Aroostook county and I think 

 there are two others that are larger than that state — that it has 

 made no great progress in pomological work. Our State 

 Experiment Station, the State Agricultural College in line with 

 it — has been doing splendid work. The state at large, taken 

 commercially, is not an apple growing state at all. You can 

 count on the fingers of one hand all the orchards of any size in 

 the state. It has one thing to talk about or think of in the past. 

 Every one of you fruit growers raising Greening apples knows 

 that you owe that apple to Rhode Island. The original tree — 

 although there is a question as to whether it is one or the other — 

 but there is one that claims the honor, two hundred years old, 

 and standing today. We have given the Greening apple to the 

 ■country. We can boast in other ways: we have given to it 

 cotton spinning and the whole cotton industry. And more than 

 that, while I see religious subjects are barred, I will say this, 

 that the noblest man that ever spoke for religious thought and 

 freedom, Roger Williams, was the man who founded the state. 

 I don't need to tell vou, but there it is. 



