286 



THE GARDENER'S MONTHLY 



[September, 



Purdy's Small Fruit Instructor — This little 

 book contains a vast amount of useful informa- 

 tion, and must be well worth all it cost to any 

 fruit grower, especially those engaged in market- 

 ing fruit. We are, in the preface, told that the 

 work "has been hastily gotten up," and is "not 

 intended for the critic's eye;" and this being so 

 w^e shall forbear from noting many little weak- 

 nesses that occurred to us in looking through it. 

 We may be, however, pardoned for suggesting 

 that we see no particular reason for baste. A few 

 months more of delay in issuing it would have 

 been no harm to the purchaser, and might have 

 made a better work. 



SCRAPS AND QUERIES. 



Gardening and Gardeners. — If the corres- ! 

 pondent whose note called forth the paragraph 

 under this head at page 253, in the August num- 

 ber, will send his exact address to the office, a 

 letter from Raleigh, North Carolina, will be for- ' 

 warded to him. 



Notes and Queries. — A correspondent says : 

 " That's right ! Plug the errors ! 



Infusion of Silica for Soup! Confused Catalpas! 

 Pronumba on Yucca filamentosa! 



Freezing of the Sap. — ' A hundred bottles of 

 water on Boston Common would all split if one 

 did.'— O. K. 



A Lover of Pears. — It has been done, can be 



done, but is not always done, that is, 'Pears 

 every morning in the year for breakfast. Strike 

 out pears and insert fruit, and it will still hold 

 true.' 



Origin of Life. — What a mystery. ' No evidence 

 that any live creature has been produced from 

 anything that had not life before.' So from the 

 beginning, so to the end. 



And so another old friend has gone, Robert Buist, 

 a man, who for his long life of devotion to the 

 culture of plants, will be remembered as a ben- 

 efactor of mankind. I have known him for 

 almost fifty years, and during this long period 

 of time he has kept up with the enterprise 

 and improvements of the age. Few men 

 have exercised such an influence on the flori- 

 culture of our country as Mr. E,. Buist. But 

 has not only raised and distributed plants 

 throughout our land, but better still, he has edu- 

 cated and raised men of his profession who have 

 been ornaments of society and leaders in the 

 horticulture of our own land. I shall take 

 special notice of him and his services in my next 

 address to the American Pomological Society, of 

 which he was one of the founders, and has been 

 a vice-president for twenty years. All honor to 

 his memory. 



Fift]i Years an Editor. — How I wish I could have 

 joined in the congratulations to my old friend 

 Major Freas. Honor, renown and long-life to 

 him; to him, the conscientious, steadfast and de- 

 voted patron of rural improvement. " 



Horticultural Societies. 



COMMUNICA riONS. 



HUMBUGS IN HORTICULTURE. 



ESSAY, BY PETEK HENDERSON. 



Read at the Annual Meeting of National Association of Nur- 

 serymen and Florists, held at Chicago, June 16, 1880. 



The life-time experience of any man is too 

 short not to be imposed upon by many of the hun- 

 dreds of old varieties of Fruits, Flowers, or Vege- 

 tables that are sent out annually under new 

 names. Any well-posted nurseryman can easily 

 detect when a Bartlett Pear or a Baldwin Apple 

 appears under a new name; or a Florist, making 

 a specialty of Roses, knows, as when some years 

 ago the old Solfataire Rose was sent out under 

 the name of " Augusta " — claiming it to be hardy 

 in every State of the Union, and sold as a great 

 bargain at $5.00 a piece— that the venders thereof 

 were either swindlers or entirely ignorant of the 

 business they had enibarked in ; or when the con- 



fiding market gardener is induced to buy a new 

 and superior Cabbage or Tomato Seed, at $5.00 

 an ounce, and finds them identical with the 

 same varieties he can buy at half that price 

 per pound, he has good reason to come to the 

 conclusion, that the man from whom he pur- 

 chased was either a humbug or else unfitted, 

 from his ignorance, to engage in the business of 

 a seedsman. 



But, unfortunately, from the varied nature of 

 these impostures, it is exceedingly difficult to 

 mete out justice to those who, knowingly or 

 otherwise, place such swindles on the horticul- 

 tural community. For the man who grows fruit 

 trees is as likely to know as little about roses as 

 the man who grows roses is to know about fruit 

 trees, and either is less likely to be posted in the 

 merits of vegetables. So, then, if the partly ex- 

 perienced horticulturist may be imposed upon 

 in such a way, how safe is the field when the 



