NEW VARIETIES OF TREE FRUITS. 433 



valley. It is not for the sea coast of the United States. In England 

 and France great honors have been heaped upon men, and very 

 justly, who have brought plants from the far comers of the globe, 

 and I believe that work is of great importance to any country situated 

 by the sea. All over the globe the sea is a great equalizer in that 

 the conditions are somewhat alike. But when you go away from the 

 sea, one or two thousand miles inland to a great valley or a great 

 plain, there you have an entirely different thing, and the honors are 

 to be for those who work, as I believe, with growing seedlings in 

 that region where they are to be. I have little confidence in the 

 doctrine that we are to get any great good by using Russian or breeds 

 from any other country. I have, however, a great deal of confidence 

 in growing a great many seedlings by bringing together the best 

 fruits we have already here. Now how shall we do that ? We may 

 buy or otherwise procure from the scientific men their crosses that 

 they have started ; our experiment stations may do that. Then let 

 those scions be put into the hands of every man who has an orchard, 

 and let him graft them in the top of a bearing tree, and let a com- 

 mittee from your society, of your wisest men, give advice where 

 they shall be grafted, and when the graft is in fruiting condition get 

 a quantity of mosquito netting and sack up that graft in the branches 

 of the tree where they have placed it and grow seedlings from the 

 seed so produced. You want to protect it by mosquito netting on 

 the graft alone. That is the work that should be done by every one 

 of us common people who are simply fruit growers and not scientists 

 at all. Let them blaze the way, and we can work after them. In- 

 stead of having a few crosses, such as any one man can make, we can 

 have a vast number of them. Then the seeds produced in this way 

 may be sent to your central experiment station or to your university, 

 if you have a good man there, or to some commercial grower of 

 seedlings who is apt in the management and growth of seedlings, 

 and let them be grown. 



I understand Mr. Burbank's triumphs are not from the crosses 

 he makes by hand, but after he has made carefully all these crosses, 

 as Mr. Patten has told us about, then hundreds of thousands of other 

 crosses are made and seedlings are grown, using mosquito netting 

 sacks, and in that way he gets a great number of seedlings, and out 

 of that great number some of them will contain the qualities of hardi- 

 ness, healthfulness and long keeping that he desires. 



I spent a day on the place of Mr. Theodore Williams, in Ne- 

 braska, this summer, and was very much impressed by what he did 

 there and what I saw and with what he told us that is, Prof. Craig 



