646 Mr. Spencer U. Pickering [Feb. 21, 



WEEKLY EVENING MEETING. 



Friday, February 21, 1913. 



Donald W. C. Hood, Esq., C.V.O. M.D. F.R.C.P., 

 Vice-President, in the Chair, 



Spencer U. Pickering, Esq., M.A. F.R.S. 



Horticultural Investigations at the Woburn Experimental 

 Fruit Farm. 



In giving a brief account of some of the results obtained at the 

 Woijurn Experimental Fruit Farm, I trust that I may be forgiven 

 if I start by mentioning a few facts which are probably familiar to 

 the majority of my audience. 



In a flower, such as that of an apple-tree [Slide shown"], there is a 

 tubular structure in the centre, forming the female portion of the 

 flower, and that is surrounded and overtopped by a number of rods, 

 bearing at their extremities sacks of pollen — this constituting the 

 male element. When a grain of pollen, either of the same or an- 

 other flower, enters the central tube, or pistil, fertilization occurs, 

 and a seed, or pip, begins to form at the bottom of the pistil. As it 

 develops, the woody substance surrounding it, which is really a 

 portion of the branch of the tree, gradually swells to a remarkable 

 extent, and eventually forms the fleshy or edible portion of the fruit. 

 [Slides shown.] We commonly call it the fruit, but it is only a 

 metamorphosed portion of the mother-tree : the real fruit of the 

 tree, the progeny of male and female elements, is the pip. When 

 this is sown in the ground, it germinates, and eventually forms a 

 new tree, which, though probably showing some resemblance to its 

 two parents, will be a new variety, and will not bear apples of the 

 same sort as the mother-tree. This is as true with plants as it is 

 with animals : children are not mere reproductions of their parents ; 

 but there is this difference in the two cases, that, while we hope 

 and expect our children to be improvements on their parents, the 

 general tendency of the progeny of cultivated fruits is to dete- 

 riorate, and to hark back to their primitive and uncultivated an- 

 cestors. It is true that all the excellent new varieties of fruits which 

 are raised are produced in this way, but it is only one pip out of 

 many hundreds which will yield a satisfactory tree, the rest being 

 worthless. It will be understood from this how fallacious it is to 

 sow the seeds of some particularly good apple in the expectation that 

 we shall get a tree producing similar fruit — we shall probably get 

 something not much better than a crab-apple. And one reason 



