PROCEEDINGS OF TWENTY-SIXTH FRUIT-GROWERS' CONVENTION. 95 



EOOM FOR THE SCIENTIFIC HOETIOULTUEIST. 



Address by BENJAMIIST IDE WHEELER, President of the State University. 



The ultra individualism which tolerated and even loved the little 

 rocky farms of New Hampshire and Massachusetts, and spent its toil in 

 building stone walls that served little more purpose than stone heaps, 

 has done its work and lived its day, and a glorious day it was. The 

 old New England farmer depended for his information about what seed 

 to put in, and when to put it in, and what to do with what came up 

 therefrom, chiefly upon the half mythical indications of the Farmers' 

 Almanac. It was a day of small things and narrow outlook. These 

 farms, however, even if they did produce small crops, and apples very 

 gnarly and very sour, availed to produce a type of men that have made 

 themselves felt in the conscience-power of this whole land. I trust the 

 broader, richer farms of this latter day and this more western land will 

 not fail to produce and continue the stock of sturdy, honest, vigorous, 

 upright men. Our schools and universities ought to have something to 

 say about that, and I trust they are making themselves felt; but our 

 purpose here to-day is to consider broadly the interests of the fruit 

 farmers as producers of fruit. 



The old New England farmer did not look to the State to help him in 

 choosing his crops or caring for them. Indeed, there was very little the 

 State could have done for him, except to sap his manhood. Everybody 

 knows what the effect of subsidy is and would be under such conditions. 

 There was very little, probably nothing, the State could have done for 

 him. Agriculture and fruit-growing were practiced according to the 

 rule of thumb. Some slender traditions derived from the forefathers — 

 some of the traditions good, some of them bad — served to make up a 

 body of lore by which those fine old farmers conducted themselves as 

 farmers. In these latter days men have come to see that the processes 

 of farming and fruit-growing are just as properly subjects of scientific 

 research as any of the phenomena which swarm about in the universe. 

 The unaided hand of the New England farmer on his little farm could 

 not have maintained an agricultural chemist or botanist; but when the 

 farmers put their heads together and their hands, and interested the 

 National Government in encouraging and aiding study which should 

 take into account the necessities and opportunities of all the farms put 

 together, there rapidly developed in itself a body of scientific knowledge 

 which could be readily adapted to the uses of the men on the farms. 

 This procedure has in nowise transcended the proper scope of the 

 mission of the National Government. It already attends to rivers and 

 harbors, striving, by making the rivers navigable, the harbors safe, to 

 provide a general field and opportunity within which the individual 



