18 THE CANADIAN HORTICULTUEIST. 



herself no longer in her teens — are offered as recent introductions. 

 It is too bad that such ignorance should prevail among the farmers of 

 Canada as to make it possible for such things to be practiced upon 

 them. No stronger argument than this need be adduced for the 

 necessity of such an organization as the Fruit Growers' Association of 

 Ontario, and the saving every farmer may effect for himself by becoming 

 a member, and carefully reading the information laid before him in 

 its reports and publications. These pear trees may be had of any 

 respectable nurserymen for fifty cents each, in truth there is not a tree 

 in the list that can not be had for that money, and if ordered by the 

 hundred could be procured for less. 



The impositions that have been practiced upon the purchasers of 

 trees have reached to such a magnitude that one might expect that 

 the farmers would cease altogether to deal with these middlemen, and 

 make their purchases direct from the nurserymen. This is not the 

 case however. Human nature seems to like to be humbugged. Ven- 

 ders of wooden nutmegs will not cease so long as purchasers can be 

 found. There are men who prefer to be cheated — to pay three times 

 the value of a thing because some silver-tongued salesman magnifies 

 its virtues and its value, and offers to bring it to their doors, rather 

 than take the trouble to write to the producer and ascertain its price. 

 A class of middlemen have sprung up to meet this very condition of 

 the public mind, men who do not own any nursery at all, but who are 

 prepared to buy where they can do so to the best advantage, as well 

 as to sell to the best advantage. The Huron Signal, published at 

 Goderich, deserves the thanks of all its patrons for showing up a firm 

 of these pretended nurserymen, in its issue of the twenty-third of 

 October last. There has been more than one of these firms doing 

 business in Canada, giving the impression that they are nurserymen,, 

 when they are not, and their sales are large, and that at prices which 

 Canadian nurserymen never think of asking. It seems as if it were 

 because they do not charge such exhorbitant prices that the public 

 conclude that they can not have these wonderful new trees — new ! like 

 the Flemish Beauty Pear and Montmorency Cherry, trees that our 

 grandfathers cultivated in the long, long ago. 



If there be anything more ridiculous than the fact that men are: 

 to be found who can be so easily duped, it is the absurd cry sometimes. 

 to be met with in the newspapers, calling upon the government to pro- 



