STATE HOETICULTUEAL SOCIETY. 287 



Adaptation : This is too great a question to discuss in this 

 paper. There is first, and foremost, climatic adaptation, and this 

 is something that seems to require centuries for its growth. That 

 we must look beyond our own country for present success in selec- 

 tions of races adapted here, is evident from the fact that nowhere 

 else in America, where apples have been grown, is there any such 

 climate in reference to summer and winter temperatures, dryness 

 of air, and the peculiarities of rainfall, all taken together. That 

 we can find this adaptation in some of the older countries abroad 

 and transplant it here, is indicated by the further fact that all the 

 sorts now growing and showing adaptation to Minnesota climate, 

 are traceable to an origin in those countries where there are sim- 

 ilar climatic conditions. We have the history of the Duchess of 

 Oldenburg. This variety was obtained by Thomas Andrew 

 Knight, President of the London Horticultural Societj^ 

 towards the close of the last century, from Simbirsk, 

 Russia, with forty other sorts, sent him by the British 

 engineers who were employed by the Russian Government in 

 the improvement of navigation on the Volga. It afterwards went 

 to France, there they dropped its Russian name of Borovinka, and 

 called it by its present name, and from thence, it came to Canada 

 and thence down the Atlantic Coast and across the river St. Law- 

 rence, and everywhere over North America. It never attracted any 

 pre-eminent attention over many other sorts until it came into 

 those parts where its Russian adaptation to extreme cold, extreme 

 heat, and extreme aridity of air and dry soil, singled it out as the 

 one only reliable variety. Knight made many crosses with his 

 Russian apple trees. They too have gone over the western world. 

 When we see a negro, we know he is from Africa, wherever he was 

 born, as we call one of the later processes in individual life; when 

 we see a mulatto, we recognize his African blood, and so it is with 

 Russian trees. The expert student sees their blood in form of tree 

 and branches, in buds, in blossoms, in leaves and fruit, and their 

 crosses can never be hidden till they fade down by division and by 

 prepotencey of mingling sorts beyond the reach of the senses to dis- 

 tinguish them. In fact we have found out almost enough already to 

 declare whenever we hear of a previously unknown sort having done 

 well through a period of seven or eight years, without seeing it, 

 "It is a Russian." Our Minnesota Wealthy, now celebrated as a 

 profitable applefor the North, passes, by the tests of botanical 

 science, into the Russian category, and acknowledges thence its 

 adaptation. Second, there is adaptation to high lands and adap- 



