68 THE NEW HORTICULTURE. 



so far, to our great loss, are identical with those practiced 

 from the beginning by wise Mother Nature. With lavish 

 hand she scattered the seed that fell upon the solid earth, 

 and produced trees after their kind, from which, down through 

 the puzzling maze of ages of evolution and the survival of 

 the fittest, where her original forests stand, she now presents 

 to our admiring gaze majestic evidences of her skill. To illus- 

 trate those principles is the main object of this book. Plain 

 as they are, I stumbled over them for years, like the rest 

 of the horticultural world, blind to the patent fact that in all 

 their peculiarities of growth and treatment, both fruit and 

 forest trees are the same. They are both the result of specific 

 conditions and surroundings. No fostering hand of man, 

 with friendly cultivator, spade or plow, was present during 

 the millions of years of their evolution, to kindly aid in their 

 struggles with climatic adversities the sturdy monarchs of 

 the forest, which from the frigid to the torrid zone, in slowly 

 changing cycles of climate, have crowned the rocky hills and 

 mountains and covered the broad valleys with their sheltering 

 boughs. So they have, through succeeding generations, 

 adapted themselves perfectly to their environments by the 

 survival of the fittest, and from age to age found in the firm, 

 unbroken virgin soil, with no disturbance of their surface 

 roots, the conditions best suited to their perfect development. 

 The same law applies to fruit trees as well. 



Perhaps, if our horticultural scientists had their way, and 

 through successive generations of like-minded descendants, 

 could but grow fruit trees for a million or so years more, con- 

 tinuously from long-rooted ones, on ground subsoiled and 

 deeply pulverized, they might ultimately, like nature, evolve 

 a race of trees that would prefer and thrive best on such a 

 soil, and fruit perhaps as well as Mr. Pierce's Rambo apple 

 tree, alluded to hereafter, or live as long as the old Seckel.^r 

 h pear. But the trees we now have to deal with 

 retain too much of the perversity of their wild parents not to 

 kick at such treatment. The experiments recounted later on, 

 of Mr. Patterson and the sjquirrels, and the stunted pear trees 

 in my Hitchcock orchard, on a muck bed, with two feet of 



