STATE POMOLOQICAL SOCIETY. 31 



Address of Welcome. 



Mr. President, and Gentlemen of the 



Maine State Pomological Society: 

 I have the privilege and pleasure ia behalf of the members and 

 friends of your Society in the town of Monmouth, to extend to 

 you a hearty welcome to this gathering- and to the hospitalities of 

 our homes. We thank you for so promptly accepting our invita- 

 tion to hold this meeting of the Society with us, and we trust it 

 will appear that in so doing you have acted wisely. 



To the most of mankind the precise location of the garden of 

 Eden is an unsettled question; but, (pardon our vanity), to us 

 the town of Monm.oulh occupies that ground ; and we have learned 

 in this restored and improved Paradise, with its almost numberless 

 pomological products, and our much enlarged wants and necessi- 

 ties, that there is no such thing as " fobidden fruit"; and though 

 we dwell not in Italy or the " Sunny South " we literally sit under 

 Our own vines and trees, with our wants well supplied and none 

 to molest or make us afraid. 



In the days of our grandmothers their store-rooms and tables 

 were ahvays supplied with an indispensable stock of dried apples 

 and pumpkins. In these, our golden days of progress and pros- 

 perity, with increased numbers and varieties of richer and finer 

 fruits, we reckon the former coarse and less nutritious fruits as 

 comparatively of no account. Long ago in this, our garden of 

 Eden, there were fruits of so poor a quality that their use by man 

 or beast might well have been prohibited. The apple trees of 

 those days, although stalwart and vigorous as the primeval prod- 

 ucts of the forest, bore small, sour and unnutritious fruit, — just fit 

 to make the sourest and hardest cider, with which to manufacture 

 the sourest and worst of drunkards; and to a great extent they 

 produced their legitimate results. 



It is discreditable tu any man to have a poor, miserable fruit 

 tree when he might just as well have a good and profitable one. 

 And the tree itself shares in the discredit of its owner. A " sour 

 apple tree " is an object of contempt and has been assigned to 

 ignominious uses. 



But, Mr. President, by the faithful and untiring labors and in- 

 fluence of this and similar societies, our Eden — and many another 

 one, too — has not only been made to " bud and blossom as the rose," 

 but has been made to bear an increase of better fruit, — "some 



