HOME GARDEN FRUITS 51 



fine pears have begun to risk the difficulties of pear culture and to 

 plant the choicer varieties, especially those that reach the market 

 after the California Bartlett season has passed. The rising genera- 

 tion may therefore fare better than the present one. 



While this commercial growing of fine ^•a^ieties speaks well for 

 the prospective improvement of public taste, it is just as much to 

 be desired that the family plantation should become as prominent 

 as in days of yore. In such plantations should be at least some of 

 the choice varieties too difficult to grow or too sparsely productive 

 to be considered for commercial ventures. For they certainly 

 minister to the esthetic admiration of color, form, fragrance, and 

 flavor, to say nothing of the pleasure of achievement in their pro- 

 duction. But they exercise a still more subtle and important 

 influence : they maintain and pass on to the rising generation high 

 standards of excellence toward which commercial fruit ventures 

 should always strive. 



It seems necessary to criticize adversely much of the present day 

 literature and many of the specialists of the agricultural colleges 

 and experiment stations. The great majority of the writings on 

 fruit growing within the past twenty-five or thirty years have too 

 strongly emphasized commercial phases and given too little heed 

 to the stigmatized "amateur" features of fruit growing as if these 

 were of an inferior instead of a potentially superior order. Ama- 

 teurs are frecjuently connoisseurs. The WTiters seem to hrve the 

 dollar so close to their eyes that they see nothing else. As i; atter 

 of fact, the great authorities on fruit gro^\'ing — Coxe, Pr nee, 

 Barry, Thomas, Warder, Brinckle, Lyon, the two Downings, and the 

 galaxy of Xew Englanders, Kenrick, . Wilder, Hovey, and the 

 Mannings, to name only a few — were all amateurs, yet what does 

 not the American public and especially the fruit grower owe them? 



They made fruit growing popular, not only in their day but for 

 ours. They undertook and with their own private capital com- 

 pleted monumental works. Nowadays the Go^•ernment and the 

 individual states pay their successors and supply the funds to solve 

 modern fruit problems. Therefore, it behooves these successors 

 to make broad instead of narrow specialists of themselves so they 

 may sympathize with and encourage amateur as well as commercial 

 fruit groA\'ing in their respective regions; for among the amateurs 



