Notes and Gleanings. 247 



Specialties in Horticulture. — The distinguished agricultural editor of 

 a leading paper recently made the following denunciation of all specialties in 

 agriculture : — 



"We protest against young men getting land, and going to work with one idea. 

 The age calls for a full development of their minds ; and, to secure it, their labors 

 and aims must be diversified. The instances where men are either satisfied or 

 successful in special farming are very few. Even dairy-farming, which is more 

 successful than any other, gives the house a look of dilapidation ; and frequently 

 there are grease-spots on the front-door. Notoriously special fruit-growers are 

 disappointed ; and we have yet to see a dozen who have got rich at the business, 

 while there are tens and tens of thousands of general farmers who have accumu- 

 lated from ten to fifty thousand dollars each." 



The writer of this extraordinary paragraph must have spent his life upon the 

 prairies, or in the forest, or somewhere away from the great centres of population; 

 and hence has never been witness to the countless illustrations of that special 

 terra-culture which is practised upon thousands of acres around every great city, 

 and without which the population of those cities would perish of famine. I can- 

 not imagine how so much oblivion of well-known facts could exist, except from 

 gross ignorance of the subject on which he writes so positively, and of which 

 one who sets up to be a teacher of others should be better informed. There is 

 a cloud of witnesses, in a thousand localities all over this broad land, whose life- 

 long experience contradicts him. It is a mistake to say that there are very few 

 "instances where men are either satisfied or successful in special farming." 

 What is raising stock but special farming ? and how would the people of this 

 country be fed if stock-raising as a specialty were abandoned .'' If it were not 

 successful and satisfactory to those engaged in it, why do they continue it as 

 such ? It is notorious that great fortunes have resulted from attention to this 

 branch of farming to the exclusion of all others. It has been so from the days 

 of the patriarchs to the present time. 



What is the enormous nursery-business now carried on in almost every State 

 but special farming, — the appropriation of land to the single purpose of produ- 

 cing plants ? Thirty years ago, two-thirds of the present nurseries had no ex- 

 istence : those then in operation were insignificant establishments. But the 

 nurseiues of the present day are colossal enterprises ; a single one embracing 

 more ground than twenty of the older ones, and crowded with hundreds of new 

 and valuable varieties of trees and shrubbery. Capital without stint is invested 

 in them. Where, in former years, there was a solitary row of cheap hot-beds, there 

 are now long ranges of elaborate forcing-houses; a single establishment having 

 acres under glass. During the past year, from Rochester and Syracuse alone, 

 five thousand tons of trees were freighted over the Central Railroad, the net 

 value of which was a million of dollars. A single nursery at Rochester contains 

 over four hundred acres, and employs a hundred and forty men. Seven others 

 in the same vicinity contain nearly thirteen hundred acres more. All these are 

 instances of strictly special farming. Are the proprietors of these establish- 

 ments " satisfied or successful " ? and, if not, why do they continue them ? Can 

 any other seventeen hundred acres be found, in this country, which yield a mil- 



