PROCEEDINGS OF TWENTY-SIXTH FRUIT-GROWERS' CONVENTION. 97 



is competent to hold any office to which the people may elect him, and 

 to enter at a moment's notice upon the completest exercise of its func- 

 tions, whether that office be surveyor of highways, inspector of milk, 

 member of the legislature, or ambassador to the Court of St. James, 

 There is a good side to this, and I sincerely hope and pray that gump- 

 tion may never cease to be numbered among American virtues. If, 

 however, we are to take our place as competitors in the modern 

 industrial race, we have got to recognize the expert and the scientist. 

 California has great interests at stake. Thirty to forty million dollars 

 a year is the value of its fruit crop. It will not be many years before 

 enlarged markets, vastly improved methods and opportunities of trans- 

 portation, and fuller application of scientific knowledge to practical 

 fruit-growing will make this crop worth two hundred millions in place 

 of thirty. What science can do for horticulture it has only just begun 

 to do. We still rely too much upon the old laissez faire methods of 

 natural growth. It is so easy to settle down into the comforts of fatal- 

 ism and urge that things will work themselves rightly if we only give 

 them a chance. Let the rains descend, and the Yv^inds blow, and the 

 sun shine as God intended they should, and intends they shall, and 

 things will grow of themselves; but there is a higher philosophy than 

 that of evolution which works in the affairs of men — it is the philosophy 

 of will, the intervention of the energized and enlightened will of man 

 whereby he shares divinity with the gods. A Burbank who bends 

 nature to his will is the representative man according to this higher 

 philosophy. It is the business of man to subjugate nature, to shape it 

 to his purposes, and to bend it hither and thither. But what we will 

 control we must first know, and the first task of the scientist who 

 through his studies will lend aid to those who gather bounty from 

 nature, is to discover the secrets of nature, her secret ways of living, her 

 secret habits of feeding, her secret methods of growth, and then he must 

 turn these prejudices and preferences of nature to his own uses and 

 purposes, just as the wise and far-seeing always play with the ignorant 

 and short-sighted, and by a law written in the face of the universe must 

 always do. 



While I am urging a very great extension of confidence in scientific 

 work and advice and leadership I am not overlooking the abundant 

 good which science has already rendered to the interests we here rep- 

 resent, especially to those interests as represented in California. The 

 problems confronting the horticulturist here are evidently in some 

 measure distinct from those in the eastern portion of the country. We 

 have recognized that the climate and the soil require special study, and 

 compel us to special processes. The investigation of our soils on both 

 chemical and physical lines which has been conducted for a series of 



7 — F-GC 



