136 NEBRASKA STATE HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



a second rate pear rather than of a first rate one. Nature seems to 

 have done her best to produce a Bartlett or a Seckel, and gone to 

 the very verge of possibility, so the next step is backward. But the 

 seeds of a second rate fruit may, once in a thousand trials, go forward. 

 If the doctrine of the survival of the fittest, by natural selection, is 

 true, certainly nobody has lived long enough to prove it. If the au- 

 thor of that much quoted sentence had said the survival of the fittest by 

 artificial selection, he would have come nearer the truth. Left to nat- 

 ural selections we have scarcely any hope at all. The tendency, a 

 thousand to one, seems to be to the un-fittest. I once had a fine lot 

 of seedlings from the Seckel, and had a mind to fruit them, but thought 

 I would ask Charles Downing first. He said not one chance in five 

 hundred or a thousand. That they would have produced a great 

 many kinds of fruit I have no doubt, for they were of very different 

 appearance. Some were thorny, some smooth, some weak, and some 

 strong. 



I would not discourage any one from trying experiments, for in 

 this way we gain knowledge. In horticulture not much is learned by 

 mere induction, but rather by experiment. Much of my life has been 

 spent in experimenting, and though I have made so many failures, I 

 do not regret this way of obtaining knowledge. Sometimes, when 

 we fail in the thing desired, we find some other valuable truth. It 

 was while they were boring for salt that they found oil and gas. Ex- 

 perimenting with the pear requires greater time and patience than with 

 any other fruit. To test a new pear for general cultivation, taking 

 into account all the qualities necessary, will require twenty or thirty 

 years. The owner of a new pear may say so many good things and 

 true things about his fruit that it would seem to be almost perfect, yet 

 it may have some one defect that renders it entirely unfit for the gen- 

 eral list. I have seventy -five large, beautiful pear trees, twenty years 

 old, free from blight, fruit of the largest size, of exquisite flavor, un- 

 surpassed in beauty, and yet these seventy-five trees have never pro- 

 duced seventy-five cents worth of fruit since they were planted. They 

 are what we call shy bearers. 



As to the varieties that have come under my observation, and that 

 seem to do well in a wide range of country, I will mention a few : 



Bartlett stands first for profit. The tree is irregular, and ugly in 

 form, but a good grower, tolerably free from blight, bears young and 

 abundantly ; fruit, large, handsome, and nearly first rate. 



