1893.] TRANSACTIONS. 19 



floral and pomological hotch-potch worse thati the original chaos. 

 Loyalty to our own Society may not preclude a mild dissipation, 

 or indulgence, in those weak invasions of Horticulture which, at 

 times, so absurdly challenge our supremacy. But no true pom- 

 ologist will gather, in September, Baldwin, R. 1. Greening, 

 Palmer, or Sutton Beauty ; no more than at the same premature 

 date, Bosc, Coniice, Seckel, Anjou, or Lawrence. To the just 

 judge, unripe Grapes are as sour as, for a different reason, they 

 approved themselves to the fox in fable. Our Members can con- 

 tinue to spoil the Egyptians, if such loot is to their taste ; and the 

 children of Pharaoh will neither know nor care. But not avow- 

 edly as members; nor with the open or yet tacit license of the 

 Society. Our co-operation cannot be halfway, no more than we 

 could touch pitch and escape defilement. It is of slight account 

 what individual citizens of Worcester may do in connection with 

 the annual attempt to compress yet a little more into inadequate 

 space. But it is of vital consequence to American Horticulture, 

 when the Members of a Society, acknowledging few equals and 

 no superiors, in its specialty, throughout this wide Continent, 

 shall continue deliberately, for the sake of a few dimes or dollars, 

 to ignore the laws of Nature ; to repudiate the lessons taught by 

 their fathers and enforced by their personal experience ; to con- 

 fuse the Seasons, perverting their Harvest-Home into the mist 

 and murk of the Autumnal Equinox 1 



So much at least we owe to our profession of Horticulture, 

 that we tolerate no abatement of the honor due to its Science and 

 Practice; that we safeguard the reputation of our fathers, and 

 the trust which they committed to our han^is, by declining to 

 continue partakers in the iniquity that, ignorantly, or of delib- 

 erate purpose, would derogate from its integrity; and that we 

 no longer rest content in a stupid severance of the members of a 

 homogeneous body, choosing ratiier to abide by the definition of 

 the lexicon which declares Horticulture to be the "cultivation of 

 a garden or orchard"; and cleaving to the faith as revealed, that 

 God "placed man in a Garden called Eden," wherein He had 

 planted everything good to eat, and for his lack of self-denial, 

 expelled him therefrom under sentence to "eat the herb of the 

 field" and to follow Agriculture "in the sweat of his face"! 



