AMERICAN ASSOCIATION OF NURSERYMEN. 197 



should be a lesson to each of our fraternity, teaching him to test the favor- 

 ites of distant regions with no more than hopeful distrust, and to prove them 

 well before proclaiming them to his friends, his customers, as worthy of con- 

 fidence and the investment of money. Many of us might have saved, and 

 may yet save, ourselves grief and humiliation by observing this simple rule. 

 '* By allowing the glamour of a foreign name and the deceptive haze of 

 distance to cloud their judgment, many honest men have had more fi'ophe- 

 sies to 'take back' than have added to their rejmtations. Careful and intel- 

 ligent experimentation is the daily duty of the nurseryman. 



" If ever any calling, whereby men ate honest bread, deserved the name 

 of profession, instead of merely business, that of the true nurseryman is 

 most deserving. No science which touches upon the lives of plants or of 

 men is outside his field of legitimate and necessary study. No matter how 

 profound a student he may be, he has need of all his gathered wisdom to 

 guide his steps into new and unexplored fields of research. It can not be 

 doubted that this association has done and has yet to do a great work in 

 stimulating the minds of its members to new and more extended studies." 



After a good word for experiment stations, Mr. Watroushad this to say, in 

 praise and blame, of that pest of pomologists, the tree peddler: "When this 

 association has settled the transportation problem and the postage problem, 

 and done its utmost to secure and propagate only the very best varieties of 

 trees and plants for each region of our broad land, there will yet remain one 

 great and heavy labor, the labor of discovering how to place their products 

 inthe hands of planters under their correct names without misrepresenta- 

 tion. The day may never come when the zealous tree missionary will wholly 

 refrain from describing a fruit or flower in rose-tinted language when seek- 

 ing an order. Neither is it at all certain that the public would be better servea 

 by tree sellers wholly without imagination and without extreme hopefulness. 

 ''Thousands of mothers and children now luxuriate upon fruit and feel 

 their souls expand under the influence of trees and flowers which would not 

 have been bought and planted except through the unflagging efforts of the 

 tree missionary who had need that day of all his imagination and all his rose- 

 tinted descriptions, to induce the planter to divert a few dollars from the 

 broad and beaten path of more corn and hogs, into the pathway of fruit, and 

 shade and flowers. These blessed means ot grace, following the path of the 

 tree missionary, may atone for all his sanguine promises as to size and sweet- 

 ness of fruit and flower, but they can not be expected to wipe away the sin of 

 deliberately filling orders with things quite different in name and nature from 

 the thing described and sold. 



"If members of this association would resolve to sell no stock to any dealer 

 suspected to be guilty of fraud in filling orders, similar dealers would be 

 forced out of the trade or to more honest and careful methods. 



"Legally no man is bound to follow his property after he has sold it. In 

 fact he cannot do so. Yet reproach is heaped upon our fraternity because 

 other men attach dishonest labels to our honestly grown and honestly sold 

 trees. This is a grievous burden to bear, and one that I am confident will be 

 largely mitigated in the near future. It can be done by no few men, but our 

 association may hopefully look to this as one of its fields of labor." 



Then followed a long report from the committee on freight classification, 

 the gist of which has herein been given ; some remarks by W. C. Barry, of 



