48 THE PEACH 



associations are still the object of family endear- 

 ment. Why should not care and culture prolong 

 the life of the tree as it does that of our permanent 

 plants and the common products of the earth? 

 Fruitfulness and longevity require culture and with- 

 out it both vegetable and animal life would result 

 in failure. And here we read the history of our 

 failure through our own prejudices and lack of en- 

 ergy years ago to grow this delicious fruit in Penn- 

 sylvania during its almost entire culture beyond 

 the limits of our State and to ba taken up by the 

 early pioneers of the enterprise the citizens of Del- 

 aware and Maryland, as a branch of common indus- 

 try and one which has added its millions of dollars 

 to their agricultural interests in raising them to 

 competence and affluence in a fifty years undis- 

 turbed monopoly of our markets. I do not speak 

 of this in any feeling of complaint, for they de- 

 serve it all for their energy and their labor. Their 

 foresight stands as a monument to their perse- 

 verance and industry. As we are now, with our 

 discoveries, placed on an equal footing, so far as to 

 say that we, too, can raise peaches at home, and 

 compete with them in our own markets, we may now 

 congratulate ourselves in the hope that the time is 

 coming when we may, in some measure, return the 

 many obligations to our friends in Delaware at 

 least by catering to their tastes in the markets of 

 Wilmington, the growing metropolis of their State. 

 The planting of peach trees will not interfere, to 



