Books 243 



some excuse for its being. But no book is all wrong. 

 More often the reader is wrong, in desiring to follow 

 its details to the letter rather than to catch its spirit 

 and to arouse himself to a new point of view. 



The following list gives a general view of the his- 

 tory of vegetable -gardening in America. Study the 

 titles chronologically from 1799 to 1900, and note the 

 ways of looking at the subject. Most of the books 

 here mentioned are now valuable only as histories. 

 Some of them are invaluable as practical manuals. It 

 is not expected that the reader will buy any consid 

 erable number of them, but the list will aid him to 

 make a selection. In those which are now out of date 

 and out of print he may have little interest, but it 

 should be some satisfaction, at the least, to know what 

 has been written and who has written it. Even if one 

 cannot use this knowledge in direct practice, he should 

 consider that the consciousness of knowing constitutes 

 half the pleasure of living. 



Every person who would grow vegetables should 

 have two or three books which treat the general subject, 

 as Greiner, Landreth, Henderson, Green, Eawson. If 

 he specializes with any crop he should procure a treatise 

 on that particular subject. If he lives in a peculiar 

 geographical region, he will need a book written par- 

 ticularly for that area, as Rolf's for the Atlantic South 

 and Wickson's for California. If one desires an author- 

 itative cyclopedic work on vegetables, he should by all 

 means own "The Vegetable Garden " (London), an Eng- 

 lish version of Vilmorin's "Les Plantes Potageres." 

 For odd and little -known vegetables the student may 



