14 WORCESTER COUNTY HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. [1889. 



carpet-beetle or cimex lectularius. There are insect foes to 

 every crop tliat man would gatlier and enjoy. We cannot sow 

 and reap in indolence ; nor does any one expect laro;e fruition 

 when he plants grain or tuber. The cotton-boll has its especial 

 worm, even as the apple has its codling moth or the plum its 

 curculio. Tiie Hessian fly and the ])Otato beetle unite the twin 

 extremes of tradition and actual observation ; ceaseless diligence 

 alone availing to arrest their destructive ravages. Oidy from the 

 orchard do we count upon a return for which wc have expended no 

 toil. We find ourselves in possession of a lot of trees, set out 

 by wiiom we may or may not know ; neglected in the past, as we 

 cannot help seeing; their bark covered by scale or moss-grown ; 

 and their branches robbed by sap-sprouts of the little vigor 

 that they might otherwise retain. If the potato beetle comes in 

 force we meet his incursion with the ready resource which 

 science has placed in our hands. Does a thunder shower 

 threaten our hay, all cured for storage in the barn ? Every 

 hand is summoned to its rescue, Sunday though it be. The 

 orchard is the one thing in the possession of the horticulturist 

 that is left to care for itself. His father planted it, forsooth, se- 

 lecting the varieties approved in his own day ; or inserting them as 

 scions when made favorably known tiiereaftcr. His son receives no 

 return, from one cause or another, in an unpropitiousyear possii>ly, 

 and straightwny the orchard is doomed to the axe and dre. It 

 never seems to occur to this Earth-Lord (is the title more sono- 

 rous than that of the Gavman War-Lord f) that there was an 

 origin to the orchard, and that like may be expected with reason 

 to generate like for all time. He has virgin soil of his own ; 

 whether such from the bounty of nature or the fault of man, is 

 immaterial. If heretofore tilled to the point of exhaustion 

 and waste. Nature has kindly intervened with her deliberate 

 process of restoration. Whether renovated or primeval it is as 

 God first looked upon it and said : 



"Let the eartli bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed and 

 the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is in itself, 

 and it was so." 



If, as your Secretary has insisted before, fruit is not grown to 

 profitable advantage throughout this County of Worcester, here- 



