HORTICULTURE FOR THE PEOPLE. 491 



EXHIBITIOITS OF FRUITS. 



The facts which I have mentioned show the gratifying progress which fruit 

 culture has made within the past thirty years. I could mention many isolated 

 iucideuts as additional illustrations. In the year 1841 the first New York State 

 Fair was held at Syracuse. We had few horticultural exhibitors in those days, 

 except at the State fairs. At that fair premiums were oifered for the best and 

 most extensive collections. The man who took the first prize carried from the 

 cars to the exhibition, in a willow basket, his entire collection. Those who 

 attended the exhibition last autumn, at Boston, of the American Pomological 

 Society, where two vast halls were crowded with specimens on their loaded 

 tables, and where the collection from a western State (in which the first fruit 

 tree was not planted sixteen years before), was so large that after filling a long 

 series of tables seven barrels of specimens were excluded for want of room, will 

 admit that we have made some progress. 



And yet, with all this increase, good fruit sells at a higher average price in 

 market now than it did when, thirty or forty years ago, there Avas not one- 

 hundredth part as much raised as at the present time. 



DIFFICULTIES TO CONQUER INSECTS. 



We have, however, not conquered all the difficulties in the way. But we 

 are constantly learning and improving. Our cold winters have enabled us to 

 make greatly improved lists of hardy varieties, by thinning out for us the 

 tender and unreliable sorts. We are still battling with insects, and gaining 

 knowledge. Take the curculio for example, which, a dozen years ago, was 

 regarded as our worst enemy. We need not fear it now, more than we fear the 

 weeds which require the labor of the cultivator, notwithstanding its great in- 

 crease. It has proved a formidable foe to smooth fruit, but we have met and 

 conquered it. On the part of many cultivators the war proved long and 

 doubtful. The expedients and stratagems were numerous, and were mostly 

 failures. The insects were to be frightened away by the tinkling of bells 

 shaken by the wind; or by offensive odors; or by belts around the trunks 

 which they could not pass; or by pavements where the young brood could not 

 effect a lodgment ; or by covering the young fruit with lime wash ; or by 

 planting the trees over water ; and they were to be entrapped and caught in 

 bottles of sweetened water hung in the trees. But one by one these were 

 found to prove failures. The fetid odors were much more offensive to the 

 owners of the trees than to the insects. The belts around the trunks indeed 

 prevented them from crawling up, but as they could easily fly when the 

 weather was warm, the remedy proved as efficacious as the ancient attempt of 

 the wise men of Gotham to hedge in the sparrows. The pavements prevented 

 the escaping larva from entering the soil, but they cost more than the value of 

 the crop, and could never be applied to orchards at large. Dr. Underhill 

 planted a row of jilum trees inclining over the water of an artificial canal, and 

 thought he had accomplished the great object because he could not easily 

 reach those parts of the tree that hung over the water, to examine whether 

 the young fruit was punctured or not. But on climbing out on these branches, 

 I found the crescent marks as abundant there as elsewhere ; but still this 

 method had some advantages, for the infected fruit dropped into the stream 

 and was carried off. But the cost of cutting the canal, and the inconvenience 

 of the position, rendered this remedy generally impmcticable. The remedy of 

 applying lime wash (so strongly recommended by Downing and other high 



