98 Notes and Gleanings. 



have been recorded, and to deduce from them the laws which should guide us in our 

 operations, from that which collects the facts ; but every laborer in the great 

 field can ask himself, when he performs an operation, why he does so ; and when 

 he observes something which he has never seen before, he can ask himself the 

 cause of it, and become so far a philosopher ; for, according to Mr. Noah Web- 

 ster, to philosophize is only to search into the reason and nature of things. 



But do not let us go to the other extreme, and despise the volumes of facts 

 which have been accumulated, for, as Mr. Saunders well remarks in the very 

 commencement of his paper, in the earlier stages of every art our knowledge is 

 necessarily confined to particulars. It is said that the wise Lord Bacon, who 

 had a large collection of works upon agriculture, had them one day piled up in a 

 court-yard and set on fire ; " for," said he, " in all these books I find no iDrinci- 

 ples ; they can therefore be of no use to any man." Now, I must be bold enough 

 to differ from so wise a man as Lord Bacon, and think that, though these books 

 were of far less value than if they had contained principles, yet, supposing the 

 facts to be correctly reported, as a great majority of them probably were, they 

 would be of use for the very purpose of establishing the principles which he 

 sought. Probably, however, he would never have thought of burning them if he 

 had only had the Journal of Horticulture to redeem them ! 



But I have already preached too long a sermon from this text, and I must see 

 what Mr. Hovey has to say about our pear culture being all quackery. What 

 can he mean ? Ah, I see ! It is somebody else who thinks our pear culture is 

 nothing but empirical ; and no wonder Mr. Hovey is a little touched, after culti- 

 vating pears for a quarter of a century, and not without some degree of success, 

 as his facts and figures show, to be told that neither he nor anybody else has any- 

 thing but empiricism, and must begin again at the a b c, and learn it all over 

 again. I should not wonder if what he says made a sensation somewhere. But 

 whatever the cause which produced it, Mr. Hovey's article is in one respect more 

 valuable than any other ever written on the subject, for no other writer has ever 

 given us such exact statistics of the quantity, and quality, and variety, and price 

 of his crops of pears through a series of years. 



Dowiiiiig's Seedling Gooseberry. — A fine cut and an accurate description, 

 like every thing that Mr. Campbell writes, of what is, in my opinion, undoubtedly 

 the finest of all American gooseberries. 



The gooseberry — I am speaking, Mr. Editor, of the y?;//^;7V«/^ gooseberry 

 — has been altogether too much neglected, perhaps for the reason that it has 

 never been properly appreciated. It appears to me its real merits have been lost 

 sight of in its general employment for cooking purposes, for its value heretofore 

 has uniformly been based on what the green fruit might be worth as a constituent 

 in tarts or pies ! Why, sir, I should quite as soon think of deciding upon the 

 qualities of a new grape from the flavor of an unripe cluster thus ignobly con- 

 verted ! Now, I pronounce a well-ripened gooseberry a luxury, and doubt not 

 ere long it will generally be regarded as such. 



In Canada, the Downing gooseberry is grown with great success. I have seen 

 it stated that a row of this variety, planted in sandy soil, had not foiled for the 

 last five years in producing large crops of perfect fruit. 



