20 HORTICULTURE. 



Pomona opened the discourse by a few graceful remarks, toucl 

 'ng the gratification it gave them that the moderns, down to the 

 ^resent generation, had piously recognized her guardian rights and 

 iose of her sister Flora, even while those of many of the other 

 Olympians, such as Jupiter, Pan, Vulcan, and the like, were nearly 

 forgotten. The wonderful fondness for fruits and flowers, growing 

 up in the western world, had, she declared, not escaped her eye, and 

 it received her warmest approbation. She said something that we 

 do not quite remember, in the style of that good old phrase, of 

 " making the wilderness blossom like the rose," and declared that 

 Flora intended to festoon every cottage in America with double 

 Michigan roses, Wistarias, and sweet-scented vines. For her own 

 part, she said, her people were busy enough in their invisible super- 

 intendence of the orchard planting now going on at sucji a gigantic 

 rate in America, especially in the Western States. Such was the 

 fever in some of those districts, to get large plantations of fruit, that 

 she could not, for the life of her, induce men to pause long enough 

 to select their ground or the proper sorts of fruit to be planted. As 

 a last resort, to keep them a little in check, she was obliged, against 

 her better feelings, to allow the blight to cut off part of an orchard 

 now and then. Otherwise the whole country would be filled up 

 with poor miserable odds and ends from Europe "Beurres and 

 Bergamots, with more sound in their French names, than flavor 

 under their skins." 



These last words, we confess, startled us so much, that we opened 

 our eyes rather widely, and called upon the name of Dr. Van Mons, 

 the great Belgian spoke of the gratitude of the pomological world, 

 etc. To our surprise, Pomona declared that she had her doubts 

 about the Belgian professor she said he was a very crotchety man, 

 and although he had devoted his life to her service, yet he had such 

 strange whims and caprices about improving fruits by a regular sys- 

 tem of degeneration or running them out, that she could make 

 nothing of him. " Depend upon it," she said, " many of his sorts 

 are worthless, most of them have sickly constitutions, and," she 

 added, with some emphasis, snapping her fingers as she spoke, " I 

 would not give one sound healthy seedling pear, springing up under 

 natural culture in your American soil, for all that Dr. Van Mons 



