1897] Fruit Growing in Canada. tj 



Englishman or the Irishman. Unfortunately, the early history 

 of fruit growing is in each of the provinces wrapped in more or 

 less obscurity. It has been the fashion in the past, that while 

 political and social events were recorded with precision and 

 accuracy, the introduction of important agricultural and horticul- 

 tural factors bearing upon the happiness and welfare of the human 

 race have been entirely overlooked, unrecorded, and their influ- 

 ence thus under estimated. How much do we owe to the person 

 who was instrumental in bringing from the orchards of Nor- 

 mandy the seed which produced our unrivalled Fameuse. Who 

 can estimate the value of that apple in ministering to the wants 

 of the poor, in supplying a luxury to the rich, and acting as a 

 colonization agent for us in the mother countries. As with the 

 origin of the Fameuse, so with many other fruits — we find our- 

 selves without definite information regarding their early history. 

 These fruits came as seeds with the early settlers,— who cleared 

 the forest, who faced privation from lack of food, danger 

 from the Indian who lived by the chase — but remained as useful 

 fruit-bearing trees to lend a semblance or likeness of the home 

 in the new land, to that across the seas. 



Reproduction in early days — fortunately for the welfare 

 and successful evolution of a race of hardy fruits — was by nature's 

 method, through the seed. By means of this agency, assisted by 

 another force operating silently but unceasingly — natural selec- 

 tion, or the survival of the fittest — many of our fruits have been 

 produced. The Fameuse and St. Lawrence, — two grand Canadian 

 apples,- -the Newton Pippin and Baldwin are familiar samples. 

 The following is the inscription upon a monument in Massa- 

 chusetts — the ouly one of its kind as far as I am aware in the 

 world — : *"This pillar, erected in 1895 by the Rumford Hisiorical 

 Association, incorporated April 28th, 1877, marks the estate where 

 in 1793 Samuel Thompson, Esq., while locating the line of the 



*Address by C. C. James before Entomological Society of Ontario, Nov. 1896. 



