196 STATE HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



now supply so large a share of the most pleasure-giving and health-sustaining 

 part of our national diet. 



''The same broad road to improvement is open in case of the cherry and 

 especially of the apple. At the risk of seeming extreme in this regard, I am 

 ■willing to go on record before you all, as saying that I believe sufficient prog- 

 ress has been made to justify a confident expectation that within the lives of 

 young men who hear my voice today, the common and universally propa- 

 gated varieties of the apple throughout the great Northwest will be the 

 descendents of the native crab apples, indigenous to the glades and thickets 

 of the prairies, which have tlirough ages unmeasured, by variation and 

 natural selection, adapted their race to every vicissitude of their climate and 

 soil, as none of foreign ancestry ever can, except by the same measureless 

 course of adaptation through seedling variation. This is not all as visionary 

 as it might appear. 



"Already have been exhibited two different varieties of apple bearing un- 

 mistakable proofs of legitimate descent from native thickets, which have 

 excited favorable attention. 



"In many different places careful and zealous experimenters are develop- 

 ing these by cross fertilization and otherwise, with high hopes for the future. 



"There is no reason why the cherry should not tread the same king's high- 

 way toward perfect adaptation. I hold that a perfectly adapted grape or 

 apple should bear its fruit and, with proper care, be as long lived as its 

 wild brethren in the thicket. Why should not this be so, as well as that the 

 civilized brain worker should, by proper living and care, not only live as long 

 in useful activity, but far outlive, the days allotted to the savage roaming the 

 forests and prairies of the same region ? And no man can answer why not. 



"The considerations here urged regarding the superiority of native forms 

 of fruit-bearing trees and plants, apply with no less force to trees and plants 

 for ornament, shade, shelter and timber. The best authorities nov/ agree 

 that American trees are the best for America. The foreign trees, with which 

 so many of the older parks and pleasure grounds of the east were planted, 

 from lack of suitable and cheap trees of our own native varieties, are steadily 

 failing, when their days of greatest use and beauty should be just upon them, 



'* One of the most eminent authorities in America, in considering these 

 failures, has lately said in bitterness of heart, that if these losses and failures 

 will only teach men the folly of proclaiming the worthiness and addptability 

 of any foreign tree or plant, before it has had a trial of a time extending at 

 least through a period equal to the natural life of a single individual of the 

 species, these losses and their lessons will not have been too dearly bought. 



"Every nurseryman id the nation should feel his responsibility to himself 

 and to his generation, not only to do what he can toward originating new 

 and more perfectly adapted varieties of fruits and plants, but also to be on the 

 watch for new and promising forms of chance origin, and to see that each 

 has adequate trial and honest judgment in at least its own botanical region. 



" I fear most of us have very inadequate ideas of the strain put upon the 

 vitality of trees and plants by transplanting them to different conditions of 

 climate and soil. In a late most admirable report of the state geologist of 

 Indiana is the statement and proofs of the fact that there exist within the 

 boundaries of that one state no less than seven distinct and well defined bot- 

 anical regions, each marked by a preponderance of certain native plants, and 

 the absence or scarcity of others, as shown by the lists submitted. This 



