lo Our Pear Culture all ^lackery. 



or, when he addressed the stu'dents of Amherst, that he was a mere 

 charlatan ? Could our friend Mr. Vick l)e such a goose as to employ 

 such a mere pretender as Mr. Barry to give us advice on pear growing.' 

 and shall we class Mr. Charles Downing, the author of the recent 

 Encyclopicdia of fruit, as one who depends on experience without 

 knowledge or art.' and where shall we place Dr. Warder, Mr. Field, 

 and Mr. Elliott, who have undei'taken to enlighten us on pear growing.' 

 Trulv we are advancing backwards, according to the dictum of the 

 editor of the Gardeners' Monthly. Mr. Knight was considered a re- 

 spectable member of the Royal Philosophical Society, and has the 

 credit of some science in his culture of fruits ; but now, with nearly half 

 a century of accumulated knowledge added to what he wrote and j^rac- 

 tised, we are farther off than ever — all empirical, all humbug. 



What Dr. Houghton writes about pear culture we can deal with 

 squarely, because, though erroneous as we believe him to be in his 

 statements, he is a cultivator of some experience, and his essay is open 

 to criticism and discussion. It is only unfortunate that he should have 

 fallen into the liands of so enlightened a commentator. Dr. Houghton 

 based his essay upon his own experience, and upon very casual obser- 

 vation ; and we do not find that he made any assertion in regard to the 

 want of skill of those who had preceded him, or that he denounced 

 anybody as pretenders or charlatans : on the contrary, he states that 

 "• at Boston, where pear culture has been pursued with much zeal for 

 forty years or more, a good degree of success has been achieved." He 

 probably intended his essay to go for what it was worth, and he must 

 regret that what there was valuable in it should have been marred by 

 interpolations of the editor upon a subject of which he was pretty 

 tolerably ignorant. 



Wc had intended to take up Dr. Houghton's essay and point out 

 what we consider some of its errors. But to do this in detail would 

 require too much space. The editor of this Magazine has already 

 given us his views, and we, therefore, only allude to some of the more 

 prominent mistakes in Dr. Houghton's paper. As we understand the 

 doctor, he wished it to be known that fine pears cannot be obtained 



