DEDICATION 



WITH feelings of the deepest appreciation for their in- 

 valuable services in behalf of the New Horticulture, I 

 now dedicate this new and revised edition. First, to 

 Farm and Ranch, the only journal in the whole country 

 that nearly twenty years ago opened its columns to what all 

 others considered the visionary "pipe dreams" of a crack- 

 brained enthusiast and declined to publish, thereby affording 

 me opportunity to present these great natural horticultural 

 truths, and save them from perishing from off the face of the 

 earth. 



Second, to Thomas L. Brunk, then professor of horticul- 

 ture at the Texas Agricultural and Mechanical College, the 

 very first man to whom I confided them, who at once recog- 

 nized their inestimable value, and the next year verified a 

 part of them at the Maryland Experiment Station, to which 

 he had been called, and from which he was discharged for 

 wasting his time and issuing a bulletin on such wild vagaries. 

 Disgusted at such blind prejudice, he embarked in another 

 line of business successfully. 



Third, to E. W. Kirkpatrick, the nurseryman and public- 

 spirited citizen, whom all Texans love to honor, who was 

 not only equally prompt to see these great truths but at once 

 put them into practice, recommending them also in his cata- 

 logue to his customers, and boldly advocating them in public. 

 To those three, the fruit-growers of the world owe a lasting 

 debt of gratitude ; but for them, they would still be in the 

 bondage of that trio of horticultural tyrants, the plow, the 

 cultivator and the pruning knife, who with their prime minis- 

 ter, the little bacterial devil, "brown rot," have from time 

 out of mind levied a tribute upon their earnings that far sur- 

 passes in amount the fortune of a Rockefeller. 



H. M. STRINGFELLOW. 



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