ilfassackiisctts Horticultural Society. 279 



by his management, led to the mimificent donations of Theodore 

 Lyman (ten thousand doUars), John A. Lowell, Samuel Appleton, 

 Josiah Bradlee, Josiah Stickney, and others. His disinterested labors 

 in building up the society, until it now stands at the head of all similar 

 organizations, and has become the most richly endowed of any similar 

 institution in the world, can never be too highly appreciated. May our 

 successors, in all future time, cherish the names of Dearborn and Wil- 

 der, as founders and pillars of the society. 



The weekly exhibitions were kept up through the season with no 

 apparent abatement of interest. At that early period, the library com- 

 prised two hundred volumes. Modern " Fruit-presening Houses " 

 were unknown ; but in the latter part of August, Benjamin Guild 

 exhibited russeting apples, in a good state of preservation, of the pre- 

 vious year's growth, which had been placed in a common ice-house in 

 January. In August, a letter was received from Van Mons, of Bel- 

 gium, in which he stated the curious fact that he once successfully 

 grafted scions sent him from New York, which had been two and a 

 half years in reaching him, and asserted the doctrine that a scion is never 

 too old, or, rather, too dry, to succeed, provided it had been cut from a 

 living tree, or from one that had not perished by a natural death ; and 

 that artificial death, such as that occasioned by deplantation, does not 

 injure in the least the excellence of the scion. 



Many kinds of native grapes were exhibited that we all tried to con- 

 sider worthy of cultivation. But William Kenrick, who could see 

 good in almost anything, slyly remarked, in one of his reports, that the 

 character of all the native grapes of New England that had been exhib- 

 ited, was " pretty much the same." Compared with the valuable kinds 

 that have been developed within a few years, they were worthless, and 

 arc deservedly forgotten. The largest pear shown that season was by 

 the old Secretar}^, Ebenezer Wight, though, as he is a bachelor, I will 

 omit the " old," and say, the public-spirited gentleman who served the 

 society so acceptably as Recording and also Corresponding Secretary, 

 for fifteen or eighteen years. The pear was raised in Dedham, and 

 weighed twenty-four ounces. 



To show how little attention was then paid to the culture of the 



