WHY SOME FRUITS ARE IMPROVED 451 



century and more, the native nuts have attracted the 

 attention of economic writers. Their merits for food 

 have been praised without stint for years. Two excel- 

 lent books have been written about them. Yet they 

 have made very little progress towards amelioration. 

 The simple reason is that we have not been pressed 

 by any necessity to grow them. No nuts are" staple 

 articles of food among the peoples who have chiefly 

 settled the United States. They are essentially sub- 

 sidiary and incidental features in our lives. So, 

 while we all like hickory nuts and walnuts and the 

 like, we are nevertheless not impelled by any over- 

 mastering necessity to gather the trees into the garden 

 or the orchard. We associate them more with the 

 woods and the landscape and the outings, than we do 

 with the kitchen and the larder. They have no con- 

 spicuous places in our heritage of customs and asso- 

 ciations, as the apples and grapes and berries have. 



Much the same observation can be made respect- 

 ing the native huckleberries, fruits which have been 

 recommended time and again as proper subjects for 

 amelioration, and yet practically nothing has been 

 done towards their improvement. The chief reason 

 of this neglect is, it seems to me, that the imperative 

 needs which the huckleberries may be supposed to 

 satisfy, are already supplied in large measure by other 

 berry -like fruits. 



There are apparent exceptions to all this in the 

 cranberry and blackberry, for neither of these fruits 

 had ever been an important food for the human race. 

 Yet the very abundance of these fruits, and their 

 adaptability to the common needs of life, forced them 

 upon the attention of the settlers and colonists, who 



