50 MASSACHUSETTS HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY 



commercial fruit growing, the majority went into other Hnes of 

 business; but among these last are many, the influence of whose 

 boyhood led them later in life to take up fruit growing either for 

 business or for pleasure. So far as I have been able to discover, 

 they have with remarkably few exceptions chosen the varieties with 

 which they were familiar during boyhood, or other varieties of 

 equally high quality. 



In those boyhood plantations fruits of low quality were con- 

 spicuous by their absence. Our fathers thought that what was not 

 good enough for them was not good enough for other people. They 

 turned deaf ears to the arguments that such varieties are robust, 

 prolific, have fine color, and that the lowering of quality will not 

 be noticed by the public in general. They knew better perhaps 

 than the present generation of commercial fruit growers that 

 nothing so tends to develop an extensive demand as a really fine 

 article. For, to quote a favorite proverb, "The remembrance of 

 quality lives long after the price has been forgotten." The man 

 who eats a poor or indifferent fruit will not be tempted soon to eat 

 or buy again ; whereas the man who eats a good one wants another 

 specimen right away. Not until money making became the ruling 

 passion in orcharding were low quality fruits planted more ex- 

 tensively than for testing. 



Though Ben Davis apple and Elberta peach must bear much 

 responsibility for curbing public appetites for apples and peaches 

 respectively, it seems safe to declare that no one fruit variety has 

 played such ha^'oc with puljlic taste as has the Kieffer pear. The 

 train loads of this whited sepulchre of a fruit that for the past 

 twenty years or more have flooded the large city markets have led 

 the public to believe that pears in general are inferior fruits, fit 

 only for canning, if that. Even the Bartlett has had its skirts 

 soiled by the commercialism that prompts California growers to 

 gather it too green and ship it to Eastern markets where its conse- 

 quently flat flavor belies its fine color and thus begins what the 

 KiefTer finishes, the suppression of the public appetite. Thus the 

 rising generation has had little chance to learn the truth that the 

 pear is one of our richest, most luscious and delectable of fruits. 



To be sure the reaction against such bar sinister influences has 

 set in; men who have learned that the public is willing to eat really 



