PROCEEDINGS OF THE SUMMER MEETING. 87 



sense, they have been built upon a system of accurately defined facts or 

 principles, and rules of interpretation and nomenclature, which serve as 

 guides to investigation, while the customary employment of significant 

 names, the generally more or less scientific training of discoverers, and 

 especially the use of the dead languages as the source from which their 

 nomenclature is drawn, secures exemption from the coarse, vulgar, and 

 sensational in their make-up. 



Pomology, on the other hand, when held to include (as it is ordinarily 

 assumed to do) a refinement of all the essential principles as well as prac- 

 tices of agriculture and arboriculture, and as trenching largely upon the 

 domain of botany, may fairly be claimed to have had an earlier origin than 

 any of those named, since its first lessons seem to have been taught to our . 

 first parents in the first garden, while insects, fungi, and the pursuit of 

 agriculture seem to have been entailed as the penalty for disobedience. 



Be this as it may, man has, beyond doubt, been a grower and consumer 

 of fruit from the beginning, and therefore in some sense a pomologist. 



Even with the experience of 6,000 years, so many, so abstruse, and so 

 variable are the conditions that few of those involved can eveji yet be said 

 to be definitely settled in the mind of the average practitioner. Ever, as 

 now, the practical application of these principles has been largely in the 

 hands of persons not given to scientific investigation, but inclined, rather, 

 to blindly follow the lead of others. 



Under these conditions, the Anglo-Saxon greed for the possession of 

 more land than can be profitably cultivated, and which is gradually but 

 surely sterilizing our farms, is also manifested in the eflPort to extend a 

 given amount of culture and fertilization over a greater extent of orchard 

 or garden, with the inevitable result of shrinkage of crops, loss of quality, 

 and increased depredations of insects and fungi — particulars to which little 

 attention has heretofore been given, and remedies for which are, even yet, 

 not well understood. 



Aside from the foregoing, the influence of soils, climate, and cultivation, 

 in modifying the qualities or peculiarities of plants and fruits, is but 

 imperfectly understood; while, in the matter of special manuring for special 

 purposes, the ipse dixit of the manufacturer and vender appears to be 

 almost the sole reliance of the purchaser. The last remark may also be 

 said to apply with equal force to one of the most important steps in the 

 entire process of fruit culture, since it is a customary practice among 

 planters, instead of resorting to trustw^orthy and disinterested sources for 

 the selection of varieties, to leave such selection to the nurseryman or his 

 agent, interested as he must necessarily be in disposing of what he may 

 deem most profitable to himself. 



The same diversity of opinion also exists respecting the best methods of 

 pruning and training, since, among those who assume the role of instructor, 

 the systems, if systems they may be called, are almost as numerous as their 

 advocates; while the dates proposed include the entire year, and this, too, 

 in many if not indeed in most cases, without regard to the object for which 

 the work is to be done. 



Of all the particulars in which this lack of matured system is observable, 

 probably none are more notable than are the insufficiency of even many of 

 the most complete descriptions of fruits as a means of identifying the vari- 

 eties intended, and the system (if worthy to be called system), upon which 

 the present nomenclature of fruits has grown up. 



