AMERICAN INSTITUTE. 165 



loirds are destroyers of bees, and proves it to his satisfaction by killing the 

 king birds, sinee which the bees have prospered. I say one swallow don't 

 make it summer. The last half of his letter contains proof in itself how 

 sadly a man may be mistaken, notwithstanding his age and experience. It 

 reads as follows : 



"Notwithstanding all the acquirements of Prof. Mapes, from nature, 

 experience and learning, I must beg leave to make some exceptions to his 

 plan of deep plowing. I know that about the neighborhood of New York, 

 the sandy and gravelly sands will bear plowing deep, particularly in Jer- 

 sey. But here in Pennsylvania, there are many parts of such clay land that, 

 if they plow below the soil into the yellow earth, their crops will be propor- 

 tionately less according to depth ; this is marked by the head furrows and 

 the dead furrows ; the first produces a full growth, and the second small, 

 and in vain may you deepen that dead furrow to make it produce more. 

 If the deep earth is always productive, then let the banks of railroad earth 

 testify to the same." 



Now, instead of Prof. Mapes's land being sandy, it is naturally one of 

 the most compact soils I know of, breaking up in lumps like stone. In 

 fact, it was a solid rock not many long ages since. It is clay instead of 

 sand land, that needs deep plowing, and it is very poor evidence against 

 deep plowing to show that " dead furrows" are not productive. Nobody 

 in this club ever advocated such nonsense. 



MOLES. 



Here is another letter that criticises a statement made here about moles 

 being insect worms, instead of grain worms. He says : 



*' This I know from every day observation to be very erroneous. I do 

 not know but moles eat insects ; be that as it may, I have no doubt their 

 principal living is seeds and roots and other vegetables. In the winter 

 time when the snow is deep and the ground not frozen, I have known them 

 to destroy whole nurseries of apple trees, and even young orchards that 

 have arrived to bearing." 



Now this man is mistaken. He is talking about mice, and not moles. 



The Chairman. — We will now take up one of the regular subjects. 



CULTIVATION OF FLOWERS. 



Andrew S. Fuller, Horticulturist, Brooklyn, exhibited a basketful! of 

 flowers, which were distributed among the females present, and much ad- 

 mired by them, particularly some seedlings, of various sorts. 



Mr. Fuller gave an interesting statement of the great labor of producing 

 seedlings worth saving. He said : " I have 200 seedling phloxes, and not 

 one worth saving. Yet all improvements come from seedlings. But the 

 handsomest and best of all summer flowers are roses, the best of which are 

 seedlings. The Souvenir de Malmaison is one of the best roses known. 



The Hibiscus is a native, and all are single and coarse, and some day 

 from seedlings we shall get a double flower, equal to double hollyhocka. 



