164: AifNUAL REPORT. 



and among the plates were placed the names of all the growers and 

 their post office addresses on smaller cards. 'These cards were all 

 picked out and carried away by the visitors. 



The grapes were not fully ripened, owing to slow growth in the 

 extraordinary cold summer of 1883, and many of the apples came 

 short of their full beauty of color for the same reason, having 

 been picked, some of them two to six weeks before maturity ; but 

 upon the whole, with the large size, perfect form, bright, healthy 

 look of all the fruit and the perfect finish and color of such sorts as 

 were fully ripe, the collection was very beautiful, and established in 

 the minds of all beholders the unrivalled adaptation of our Minneso- 

 ta soil and climate to the production of the northern fruits in their 

 highest excellence. Let me not be misunderstood here. I did not 

 exhibit these fruits with any claim that the varieties of trees pro- 

 ducing them were all hardy and profitable; I was careful to repre- 

 sent the facts as they are — that we have as yet among all the sortg. 

 we are fruiting but few really hardy ones; but I felt proud to show,, 

 and it was a great satisfaction there to pomologists to learn, that 

 we had this much of certainty in our fruit growing, beauty and 

 quality, and that these great requisites to profitable horticulture 

 were to be seen to the best advantage in our very hardiest sorts,, 

 such as Duchess and Wealthy. T think the Duchess exhibited in 

 this collection were the finest in color, I ever saw. There 

 was nothing approaching them in beauty in the entire 

 exhibition of apples. And the Wealthies wanted nothing but a 

 little more time in orchard to paint and varnish their faces in the 

 autumn sun to be the superiors in beauty of their earlier ripening 

 neighbors, the Duchess. 



One thing familiar enough to us, but seemingly new to the vis- 

 itors at this exhibition, was the fact that we had got so much of 

 the quality of the apple into our little crabs, in our experiments 

 in fruit growing out here in the West. Our Whitneys No. 20,. 

 our Early Strawberry, our Beecher's Sweet, Briar Sweet, Sylvan 

 Sweet, Sweet Russet, Angular, Orange and many others were a 

 surprise to them. Having abundance of samples it was an amuse- 

 ment to note the pucker in the mouths of committees and visitors, 

 which the sight or touch of a crab would give them, from their 

 idea of crab quality, and then take it out and substitute the aston- 

 ished and satisfied expression that followed the tasting of a Whit- 

 ney, a Beecher Sweet, a sweet Russet or an Angular crab. There 

 were many novelties on the table, found in the search for these 

 fruits — varieties heretofore unknown to this society — new seedlings 



