470 FRUIT. 



In this way, and for the most part by the ordinary chances and 

 results of culture, and without a direct application of a scientific 

 system, what may be called the natural limits of any fruit-tree or 

 plant, may be largely extended. We say largely, because there are 

 certain boundaries beyond which the plants of the tropics cannot 

 be acclimated. The sugar cane cannot, by an} process yet known, 

 be naturalized on Lake Superior, or the Indian corn on Hudson's 

 Bay. But every body at the South knows that the range of thfc 

 sugar cane has been gradually extended northward, more than one 

 hundred miles ; and the Indian corn is cultivated now, even far 

 north in Canada. 



It is by watching these natural laws, as seen here and there in 

 irregular examples, and reducing them to something like a system, 

 and acting upon the principles which may be deduced from them, 

 that we may labor diligently towards a certain result, and not trust 

 to chance, groping about in the dark, blindly. 



Although the two modes by which the production of a new va 

 riety of a fruit or flower the first by saving the seeds of the very 

 fruit only, and the other by cross-breeding when the flowers are 

 about expanding are very well known, and have been largely prac- 

 tised by the florists and gardeners of Europe for many years, in 

 bringing into existence most of the fine vegetables and flowers, and 

 many of the fruits that we now possess, it is remarkable that little 

 attention has been paid in all these efforts to acclimating the new 

 sorts by scientific reproduction from seed. Thus, in the case of 

 flowers while the catalogues are filled with new verbenas every 

 year, no one, as we can learn, has endeavored to originate a hardy 

 verbena, though one of the trailing purple species is a hardy herba- 

 ceous border flower and perhaps hybrids might be raised between it 

 and the scarlet soils, that would be lasting and invaluable ornaments 

 to the garden. So with the gooseberry. This fruit shrub, so fine 

 in the damp climate of England, is so unsuited to the United States 

 generally or at least most of the English sorts are that not one 

 bush in twenty, bears fruit free from mildew. And yet, so far as 

 we know, no horticulturist has attempted to naturalize the cultivated 

 gooseberry in the only way it is likely to become naturalized, viz. 

 by raising new varieties from seed in this country, so that they may 



