TWENTY-EIGHTH FRUIT-GROWERS' CONVENTION. 



53 



you that bran has a value of $11, and when you know that by the 

 purchase of those and feeding cattle and doing it wisely we can make 

 money on it — for people are doing it — then certainly this is not simply 

 visionary. It is something that all ought to heed. 



DR. WOODBRIDGE. Now, in regard to the puffy oranges. I want 

 to say that I never have analyzed a puffy orange that has not had the 

 maximum amount of sugar in it, which shows that it was ripe at the 

 time it was puffy. And I remember hearing Mr. Charles Chapman say, 

 in a paper he read before one of the institutes some two or three years 

 ago, that the time to market oranges was when they were ripe. If you 

 will take an orange from a tree that has puffy oranges on it, you will 

 find, as I have done in over a hundred instances, that the puffy orange 

 has more sugar in its juice every time than has the solid orange that is 

 not puffed. Therefore, 1 think, although I am certain that nitrogen 

 will hasten the ripening of an orange, it will cause it to puff sooner. 



PROFESSOR C. R. PAINE. Outside of your test, when you come 

 to taste a puffy orange, do you not always find it more insipid than any 

 other orange on the tree at the same state of maturity? 



DR. WOODBRIDGE. I am judging entirely by the polariscope. 



MR. PARKER. I tried the experiment some years ago, upon a little 

 piece of orchard, of watering my trees regularly from September right 

 through the last part of the growing season, so that the ground was 

 not dry at any time until after the main rains came in the fall. I kept 

 irrigating up to that time. And I found that I had scarcely any puffy 

 oranges on that little piece. I think that where the sap stops and 

 checks for a period of time, from any time in September on, and then 

 starts to flowing again, that is, when the spring growth starts in Febru- 

 ary, the sap goes into the orange quite freely, and that is what is the 

 Cause of the purring. 



MR. KRAMER. There is a certain law of nature which I think 

 bears upon this question. Weakness causes overgrown fruit, the same 

 as it is the cause of small fruit. No matter what causes the weakness, 

 it makes the fruit overgrown or too small. I have found out that a good 

 many orange trees when they were only slightly eaten by gophers pro- 

 duced an enormous sized fruit, but when they were very badly barked 

 it was a matter of oranges small in size and full of seeds. So, as we all 

 learn in botany, there is this law that it is weakness that causes over- 

 grown fruit and it is weakness that causes small fruit. Every fruit tree 

 has got to be properly cultivated and have every proper condition of the 

 climate and soil and everything right, in order to have the fruit in 

 perfect condition. 



MR. BERWICK. That only puts the question one step farther back. 

 Suppose that is true; then what is the cause of the weakness? I have 

 lived quite a long time in California, and I recall the time when we 



