50 Reports of Cowmittees. 



those living in the temperate and torrid zones. The eagerness with which 

 children seize even immature fruit, proves the inherent longing in our natures 

 for the cooling antiseptic and refreshing influences which fruit furnishes. 

 With more apples, pears, peaches, and grapes, and less meat, our systems 

 would not be strained so constantly to their utmost tension, and we should 

 have less dyspepsia and neuralgia. We can have, and should have, an 

 apple to eat each day in the year, and the modern mode of excluding air 

 by canning, enables us to be furnished with all manner of fruits in fresh con- 

 dition at all seasons. We call no farm perfect without its apple and pear 

 orchards. The apple of late years has been a little coquettish in its habits, 

 and some may have been discouraged from cultivating this most productive 

 and most useful of the fruits. Let such remember that even in our most 

 unproductive seasons, more and better apples arc raised in the northern and 

 western sections of our country than in any other part of the world. Our 

 soil and climate as a whole arc exceedingly well adapted to this fruit, and 

 nowhere does it find a more congenial home. Others have feared that, by 

 the great increa.se of nurseries, and multiplication of orchards, the market 

 for apples would be overstocked. We need only to remind these fearful 

 ones that the price of apples has steadily risen in our country. The increase 

 in demand has more than kept pace with the increase of orchards, so that 

 the price of refuse apples, fit only to be made into cider, is now more 

 than our fathers could obtain for choice winter fruits. They thought them- 

 selves fortunate if they could obtain one dollar per barrel for picked, graft- 

 ed apples. We are not content unless we realize four or live times this 

 amount. Cider, that most healthy of all the vinous beverages, was form- 

 erly sold by the barrel for about the* same that it now brings by the gallon. 

 The foreign demand for apples has also greatly increased. England, with 

 her foggy atmosphere, intercepting the solar rays, cannot produce the 

 high colored and high flavored fruit peculiar to our country, and will most 

 gladly purchase all our surplus production. ]>nt so far, we have had little 

 surplus, for comparatively few, even in our favored land can say, they have 

 all the fruit they desire. Let no one then be discouraged by an occasional 

 unfruitful season, or by fear of an overstocked market, from planting apple 

 orchards. We hope soon to see some remedy devised against the attacks 

 of the curculio and other insects, which now are the pests of our orchards, 

 and if no other more profitable disposition can be made of our apples, our 

 cattle and swine will consume all we can raise. 



While apples of late years have become a rather uncertain crop, the 

 vigor of pear trees has increased, and their variety and quality must now 

 satisfy the most fastidious. The old maxim was, 



"lie that plants pears, 

 Plants for his heirs," 



but, thanks to Van-Mons, and other pear cultuiists, we can plant pear trees 

 one year and gather fruit from them the next. While the pear is not so 

 lusting a fruit as the apple, it is more luscious, and both for the dessert and 



