122 Notes ajid Gleanings, 



ture, and applies them in his own cultivation, and tests their value, must needs 

 be a worse gardener than his neighbors. And our " practical " friends are not 

 above visiting their brother cultivators (when the distance to be travelled is not 

 too great) and examining and discussing their methods of culture, and their 

 jiew varieties of fruits and flowers. Now, will they tell us why the knowledge 

 thus gained would not be just as good if they had read it in a book where it had 

 been printed for their benefit, and that of a thousand or ten thousand others ? 

 Certainly, while every science, every profession and trade, physicians, lawyers, 

 architects, builders, cooks, in fact, every occupation that can be named, have 

 their treatises and manuals, giving not only rules for action, but the principles 

 which underlie them, it would be very strange if horticulture should form an ex- 

 ception to every other art, and horticulturists could get along just as well with- 

 out as with the aid to be derived from the recorded experience of their fellow- 

 laborers. What would be the fate of the physician, for instance, who should 

 rely on the experience gained in his own practice, and think it beneath him to 

 look into a medical book ? Of course, he would be nowhere in the race ; and 

 that is just wliere the horticulturists who never read a book will find themselves 

 whenever they wake up, and get their sleepy eyes open, — with all their competi- 

 tors away out of sight ahead of them. Whoever will note the men who seem 

 ;to take a kind of savage pleasure in decrying "book-farming," will be pretty 

 sure to find in them plenty of conceit and narrow-mindedness, as far as possible 

 removed from the generous thought and breadth of view which comes of a full 

 acquaintance with the history of all the discoveries in horticulture, and a knowl- 

 edge of the improvements daily made by the hundreds of active minds now ap- 

 plied to it, under the combined stimulus of a love of the pursuit, and the hope 

 of the pecuniary reward which is sure to follow every valuable improvement. 



Old Pear-Trees. — Mr. Jefferson Raitt of Eliot, Me., has in his garden 

 some pear-trees which bore fruit in 1730, and are now in healthy growth. 



Directions for planting Strawberry-Seed. — Make a bed of light, 

 ■rich soil, rake fine and level, and plant the seed in drills one foot apart. Cover 

 the seed with about one-eighth of an inch of soil, and water freely. Seed planted 

 in the summer or fall will come up the next spring. Protect the plants the first 

 winter with a covering of leaves. Thin and transplant the second year, so that 

 the plants shall stand one foot apart each way. Some will bear fruit the second 

 summer. 



