KKCENT ADVANCEMENT IN IIOUTICULTUIIE. 131 



uriv 



Tell me the old, old story,'' is a good statement. If we can 

 take the old, old story and tell it in terms up to date we can 

 perhaps understand it better. 



We are dealing essentially in horticulture, with the same 

 subjects and with the same methods as our forefathers did. 

 We can measure the advancement onlv as we can add to the 

 growth of the subject in the same way as they added to the 

 generations that preceded them. Horticulture is advancing 

 nevertheless, and rapidly, but it is a fact that it is by gradual 

 accretions, a growth upon those which went before means all 

 the more to my mind and should make us feel all the more 

 respectful for that growth if we could feel that it was some- 

 thing striking, because the strikingly new would necessarily 

 be new enough ; we would not have the long decades which 

 experience has had. Horticulture is advancing in every de- 

 partment. Take for instance one subject that comes promi- 

 nently to my mind as having been marked by very recent 

 progress — that of spraying. Spraying has now come to be 

 recognized by leading orchard ists as a necessary part of the 

 orchard management. Leading fruit growers are coming to 

 realize that it has just as much a necessary part of successful 

 orcharding as is pruning, handling of the soil, or even gath- 

 ering, grading, and properly handling the fruit crop itself. 

 There is probably no other factor connected with orchard 

 management which has had its rise and development in so 

 short a period of time as has spraying. 



The art of grafting and budding has been knoAvn and prac- 

 ticed for centuries, yet leading nurserymen and fruit growers 

 are still working out new details as to better methods. 



Pruning, likewise, has for centuries been practiced, and yet 

 even today we still find the active horticulturist still further 

 formulating and systematizing his methods of pruning, and 

 he adapts this work to various varieties, soils, and climatic 

 conditions. 



While methods of destroying noxious insects by means 

 which might be called spraying have for decades been known 



