60 Second Annual Repoet 



SUNSHINE.* 



BY GEO. W. PERRY OF CHESTER. 



My subject, although a very bright one, is so simple and 

 common that I imagine most of you have the same fear, which 

 I have myself, that it cannot be made interesting or profitable. 

 I suppose that many of you have an idea that I am going to treat 

 it scientifically, and tell all about the chemical action of the sun 

 upon the soil and plant and talk about cell life, etc. All of that 

 I will leave for the professors, hoping myself to speak in 

 language intelligible to a child. 



Isn't it queer that the things that are worth the most to us, 

 and that are right around us every day, and which come to us 

 without any effort on our part, we appreciate the least? We 

 feel about the sunshine a good deal as did tlie Irishman, who 

 said that he thought the moon was a great deal better than the 

 sun, "For you know" he says, "that the moon shines in the 

 night when we need it very much, while the sun shines in the 

 day-time when it is already light enough without it." 



If I were to ask a boy down here by the mill,, "What is it 

 that runs that mill?" do you know he would think I was guy- 

 ing him or that I was a fool ; and, if he answered at all, would 

 say, "Don't you see the dam over there? Water power runs 

 it?" And yet, if he were to answer me correctly, he would say 

 that the sunshine runs it. For the sunshine must pick up the 

 water from the ocean and carry it up onto the hills and drop 

 i: down ; and, in its struggle to get back to its native home, it 

 pushes against the buckets of the water-wheel, and runs the mill. 

 It is the sunshine,, stored up in the trees and plants that lived 

 countless ages ago, compacted into coal, that we liberate under 

 our boilers to run express trains, drive our steamships, light 

 our streets and run our trolley cars. It is sunshine that is the 

 physical force of the whole earth, and electricity, light, heat 

 and force are only dififerent names for it. 



Let us think that it must be the sunshine then that is the 

 physical energy that builds up the tree,, and makes the fruit 

 that drops into our laps; and that it is the greatest factor of all 

 in the production of that fruit. And yet, it is talked very little 

 about, and thought very little about. We have learned of late 

 years, to plant our apple trees at greater distances apart, and 

 thin out the branches, so the sun can shine all around the tree, 



*NoTE. — Mr. Perry stated that although he was a resident of Chester 

 all of his experience in fruit growing'had occurred on the shores of Grand 

 Isle, where he is a_summer resident. 



