NEW OR NOTEWORTHY FRUITS. II* 



U. P. HEDRICK. 



INTRODUCTION. 



The purchase of new fruits is one of the perennial problems of 

 fruit-growers. Each spring the catalogues come and the tree-buyer 

 must decide whether he will test the most promising of the new 

 varieties offered or wait until their value is demonstrated by others. 

 The problem is made doubly difficult because nurserymen customarily 

 describe the merits of their novelties in glowing terms and brightly 

 colored plates but do not trouble themselves to illuminate by word or 

 picture the faults of their introductions. Absolute confidence in 

 these one-sided descriptions is usually a source of disappointment; 

 and the buyer, once defrauded, assumes a hostile attitude toward 

 all new varieties. Condemnation of novelties has thus become 

 habitual among fruit-growers. Such an attitude is unsound. A 

 brief consideration of the improvement of plants shows that 

 denouncing novelties is setting oneself against progress. 



Unquestionably the limit of improvement has not been reached 

 in the domestication of any cultivated fruit. Seedling fruits spring 

 up everywhere, the best of which survive and compete with estab- 

 lished sorts. Through intercrossing, plant-breeders are constantly 

 producing new varieties of all the fruits. So, too, we occasionally 

 find sports or mutations more valuable than the variety from which 

 they are offshoots. Again, every now and then a species not known 

 in cultivation is ushered in and proves profitable. Evidence of the 

 advancement of horticulture through the introduction of new forms 

 is to be found in the many recent new-comers manifestly in advance 

 of any of their kind. Evolutionists tell us that there are more species 

 of plants on earth now than there have ever been at any previous time. 

 We may assume that if multiplication of forms accompanies the 

 evolution of wild life the evolution of cultivated plants must follow 

 the same law. 



Reprint of Bulletin No. 385, April. 



[602] 



