62 STATE HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



great mass of people cannot afford to pay fancy prices for fancy pack- 

 ing. What they want is quantity combined with fair quality. The 

 barrel package supplies that demand and will for many years to come. 



The easterner should, therefore, be conservative on the subject of box 

 apple packing. The western methods of growing and packing are 

 more expensive than the eastern scheme, and the net returns are scarce- 

 ly, if any, greater, busliel for bushel. And so, although the drift is all 

 toward the box the easterner should not begin their use until he is 

 fully prepared, and that is only when he can procure boxes as cheaply 

 as barrels, bushel for bushel, when he can produce at least 90% fancy 

 or No. 1 fruit, in large quantities, not only one year, but year after 

 year; when he can command skilled and experienced packers and when 

 he has a market educated to that style of package. At present less than 

 one grower in ten — east of the Mississippi — meets these conditions. 



PEDIGREE TREES. 



C. C. CARSTENS, MICHIGAN CITY, INDIANA. 



"Breed is more than feed." This expression applies to all domesti- 

 cated animals, and a horse, a cow, a pig, or a dog is valued according 

 to its pedigree. 



By the term pedigree we refer to the genealogy, the descent or in' 

 simpler terms, a pedigree is the record of the line of ancestors. The 

 pure races of animals which we have today were produced by repeated 

 selection or crossing of the ancestors of our present day animals. The 

 record of these ancestors is the pedigree. 



In 18G2 pedigree wheal was produced, bred upon the same principle of 

 repeated selection, the same principle which has produced pure races of 

 animals. 



Now the question arises; is it important that we know the pedigrees 

 of plants, propagated from buds, scions, cut lings and off-shoots of 

 plants, as it is in the case of men, animals and seeds? 



The pedigree idea rests upon the most Important principle of plant 

 breeding — that of selection. We know that no two trees in any orchard 

 are exactly alike, either in the amount of fruit which they bear or in 

 their vigor and habit of growth. Some are uniformly productive and 

 some are uniformly unproductive. We know too that scions or buds 

 lend to reproduce tin 1 characters of the trees from which they are taken. 

 If all other plants are being improved by selection, and the improve 

 ments are handed down to their offspring, why can we not improve our 

 varieties of fruits by selection of scions, buds and cuttings? 



Before we go further we must first draw a clear line between plants 

 propagated from buds and scions and those grown from seeds. In the 

 case of seeds we have the offspring inheriting a combination of definite 

 characters of two parents. Since these combinations of characters hand- 

 ed down from parents to children are never the same we find that indi- 

 vidual seedlings from the same two plants may vary greatly. 



