STATE POMOLOGICAL SOCIETY. 67 



know whether they were true to name or not. In recent years 

 some of you have, as the boys say, "got stuck." You have 

 ordered nursery stock of certain varieties that you wished to 

 set. The trees came, and you set them out. If they hved to 

 fruit, you had all sorts of fruit ; and where you ordered Bald- 

 wins perhaps you got Ben Davis, or some other apple of infe- 

 rior quality. Now the new law requires that each agent, or each 

 person, who sells nursery stock in the State of Maine shall have 

 a license, that license to be issued from the Department of Agri- 

 culture. So if a man comes to you and wants to sell you some 

 nursery stock, and you ask him for his license and he can't show 

 you one coming from that department, you may put him down 

 as being not legally in the business. I think you will agree 

 with me that this is a step in the right direction. It originated 

 with this idea of the New England fruit show. 



Another lesson that we learned at the fruit show, I think 

 many of you who visited the show will agree with me, is that we 

 are planting too many varieties in Maine. I spoke the other 

 day in a town not far from here, where a man had an exhibit 

 of fruit, and I found in conversation that he had quite a number 

 of varieties, so I asked him : "How many varieties of apples 

 have you in your orchard?" He replied: "I have one hundred 

 and forty-seven." Just think of it ! A sane man in the State 

 of Maine worrying over a product of one hundred and forty- 

 seven varieties. He is a good deal like the young man that 

 only a few years ago asked me : "How many varieties are there 

 that I can grow in the State of Maine?" I said: "What on 

 earth are you driving at?" "Why," he said, "I want to set all 

 the varieties of apples I can so as to take them to the fairs and 

 get all the premiums." If that is what our young men are 

 going to do in orcharding for the next few years, they would 

 better go into something else. We saw all sorts of names up 

 there at Boston. A man from Maine entered ten leading va- 

 rieties. One of those varieties was marked "The Schoolhouse 

 Apple." Some of you may be familiar with it. I was familiar 

 with a schoolhouse apple when I was a boy, that is, an apple 

 tree near the schoolhouse. The apples didn't stay on it very 

 long. It might have been a schoolhouse apple. 



Now that is one mistake we are making ; and if you have got 

 forty varieties I would top work more than half of those. Those 

 of you who were at the show I think learned that those apples 



