EDITOR'S TABLE. 



Washing and Scraping Trees. — It is not at all uncommon, in these days of literary and 

 practical plagiarism, for amateur liorticulturists in search after truth, to ask for bread, and 

 receive a stone, — to ask for knowledge, and receive a jumbled medley of plaguied nonsense, 

 from some new-fledged stripling who fancies himself qualified by nature to teach mankind. — 

 And never was this more truly and strikingly apparent, than in a paper signed R. Morris 

 Copeland, which has been published in some of the journals as emanating from the Massachu- 

 setts Horticultural Society. I had thought, Mr. Editor, that this piece of nonsensical, absurd, 

 and contradictory jargon, would, from its very character, exonerate any sensible and intelligent 

 member of the Massachusetts Horticultural Society, much more the Society itself, from any 

 odium attached to sending such a production into the world. It would seem, however, that this 

 R. Morris Copelaxd has, in publishing this precious piece of bombast in one of the Boston 

 papers, purposely, or, to be charitable, unintentionally identified the Massachusetts Horticultural 

 Society with the paper, simply because such paper was presented to the Society and ordered 

 to be laid on the table, and printed for the use of the members, as such worthless papers gene- 

 rally are. Nor would the manifest vanity of the author of such paper, sending it of his own 

 accord, and entirely unknown to any other person, even to the other members of the committee, 

 deserve the slightest notice, other than that silent contempt generally accorded to such a pro- 

 ceeding. But when we find the same person vilifying and abusing as carping critics, &c., all 

 and every one who chooses to condemn his so-called report, as he has done in the " Practical 

 Farmer" a very good paper published in this city, then I say we think it almost time to inquire 

 who this mighty Achilles in tree-scraping is? — what amount of experience he has embodied in 

 the report, ani brought to bear on the subject?— and, moreover, whether said paper is sanc- 

 tioned by the Massachusetts Horticultural Society, or even a committee of it ? 



On inquiry, we find this doughty opponent of the experience of every intelligent horticul- 

 turist who has given any attention to the subject, to be a new-fledged stripling from a public 

 school, who made his appearance last year about Boston as a Landscape Gardener, — the science 

 and art of which, we believe, he learnt at said school, — and who has been found unable to tell 

 the names of even the commonest forest trees, keeping the culture and diseases of such trees out 

 of the question. Do you not feel ashamed, you carping critics and snarling editors, /or stigma- 

 tizing a paper issuing from no respectable a source ? But, the names of Marshall P. "Wilder, 

 Samlei, Walker, Joseph S. Cabot, Ac, are lugged in by our hero of the wire brush, to back 

 up his impudent deception. Let me ask, will those gentlemen acknowledge the parentage of 

 such a paper ? But hold on, I have a host of authorities. I have, says the learned investigator 

 of this useful subject, "composed my report of the written expressions of Emerson, Agassiz, 

 Russell, Gray, Harris, Ac." So that this learned reporter has investigated the pages of these 

 authors, and not the subject for which the committee was appointed by the Society; and instead 

 of patiently and perseveringly investigating a subject requiring years of observation and exj)e- 

 rience on the part of the investigator, we have a jumbled report composed of sentences and 

 disconnected remarks from the writings of the authors above mentioned, interspersed with some 

 silly, insipid balderdash of his own ; the whole so garbled as to be perfectly unintelligible, and 

 60 contradictory as to mean neither one thing nor another. 



And who were the committee ? The other two, from want of time, or from some other cause, 

 never read the report xmtil they saw it in a public paper. They deny knowing anything about 

 it ; and consequently it was not even the report of a committee of the Society, nor do I believe 

 that three men could be found in the whole Society, who would put their names to such a 

 report. From his splenatic remarks in the " Practical Farmer" of Saturday the 19th, R. Morris 

 Copeland appears terribly insensed at the remarks in your last number, at the queer set of 

 resolutions, &c., and says: "An argument based upon facts, as well as common sense, deserves to 

 be answered by arguments of a similar nature ; yet no one can find in all of the two, and most 

 of the four articles, anything beyond word criticism and the absolute diota of men whose opin- 



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