FRUIT IMPROVEMENT 77 



sibility of raising a supply of foods from the soil, 

 and thus lured him away from the precarious 

 pursuits of the hunter and fisher and put him on 

 the road to future greatness. 



And all along the road of advancing civiliza- 

 tion the friendship with the fruit tree has been 

 kept up. Yet it is only in comparatively recent 

 times, probably, that rapid progress has been 

 made in aiding these coadjutors of the porno- 

 logical world to step forward and better them- 

 selves as man had long ago bettered himself with 

 their assistance. To be sure, our forebears de- 

 veloped many forms of fruit that were not lack- 

 ing in palatability ; but the great advances in the 

 improvement of orchard fruits are matters of 

 the nineteenth century. 



Recent progress in this field has been almost 

 as wonderful as progress in the fields of me- 

 chanics and electricity. 



The orchard fruits of to-day that find their 

 way to the markets are so different in size and 

 quality from the fruits with which our grand- 

 parents were satisfied even though some of 

 them are grown on cions grafted on the old 

 trees as to seem to belong almost to differ- 

 ent orders, certainly to different species from 

 the fruit stocks from which they have been 

 developed. 



