TWENTIETH ANNUAL MEETING. 169 



got the greatest benefit. I never feel like talking to an aud- 

 ience of horticulturists without expressing my gratitude for 

 the work that the United States Department of Agriculture 

 has done for us in Virginia. We are only about two hours 

 and a half from Washington, so that the gentlemen can come 

 up easily, and last summer what I conceived to be a rather 

 remarkable circumstance occurred in my orchard, and I am 

 going to take time to tell you about it, thinking maybe 

 something of the sort might help you. 



Dr. Waite of the Department of Agriculture, had been 

 ■conducting those experiments in the orchard all summer. In 

 the latter part of August he had a field meeting; and it was 

 an interesting thing to the apple growers, one hundred and 

 fifty of whom were present. I was interested to find out how 

 they took the lecture, that they came to hear. I had that same 

 idea, that a man ought to know where he is going, for if he 

 doesn't he will never know when he gets there, and I wanted 

 to see how many of those fellows had that disposition. So I 

 circled around on the outskirts of the crowd, and observed, 

 to my surprise, and somewhat to my chagrin, that a good 

 many of the fruit growers were cranky, they wanted to be 

 shown, they didn't know about this spray or that spray, and 

 they didn't know about this way to trim trees, and I didn't 

 altogether like the attitude. 



About two weeks later, when I had fifty or sixty men in 

 the orchard picking apples, I said : "Dr. Waite, will you try 

 that experiment over again, I am going to have all my men, 

 just ordinary farm labor, come down out of the mountains 

 for apple picking work, and I am going to have those fellows 

 come here at dinner time, and I want you to take them 

 through the experiment, and lecture to them just like you lec- 

 tured to our peoi)le.'' Well, the first sign I noticed was a feeling 

 of pleasure on the part of those men at the fact that we had 

 iDeen considerate enough to take them through that course. 

 Some of them had been working at it all summer, hut didn't 

 Icnow anything about it. Dr. Waite took those men, a good 

 many of whom couldn't read or write, and spent half a 



