BUD TRANSFERENCE AND ITS EFFECTS ON FRUIT. 27 



become a quick partner in an early healthy and abundant return 

 himself. As we intelligently gain a mastery of the position, and 

 obtain a thorough experience in these essential ranges of fruit 

 culture, so will our interest deepen from the first formation of 

 the bloom bud, until the fruit is matured a year afterwards. I 

 have laid it down as an axiom or established principle, that 

 chemistry must have in the future as much to do with successful 

 fruit culture, as in any and every form of farm work. Now 

 what appears to me to be of most interest for the chemist of the 

 present day — I am not a chemist, and I am too old to take up so 

 wide a range of inquiry as the scientist in chemistry has before 

 him — but I am certain that if judicious crossing has to reach 

 the glorious position of obtaining improved varieties by the 

 transference of the superior qualities of first-class fruit, as to 

 form and flavour, the lengthened season of superior, and fine 

 looking fruit, I can see most plainly that they are easily within 

 its immediate grasp, and that it must be very largely obtained, 

 through the careful and thoughtful blending of the juices, for I 

 take it, that juice is not merely the characteristic fluid produced 

 by an excess of moisture, but that which produces its own 

 saccharine through the influence of sun power not merely on 

 the fruit, but likewise by happy action on bole and branch and 

 twig in its passage through its larger or lesser ducts, by which 

 the fluid in its slowly ripening sweetness centres at last in all 

 its glory in the perfect fruit. This, I think, will no doubt be a 

 subject of paramount importance for the scientific fruit-grower 

 of the future, for I feel sure there must be a way lying within 

 easy reach of the skilled investigator, not only to obtain new 

 varieties of choice fruit in this way, but, what may be still of 

 greater value, of giving the finest kinds greater vigour, greater 

 endurance, and so more resisting power to the climatic in- 

 fluences which we in our happy island home have constantly to 

 contend with. It is not merely the soil that has to be con- 

 sidered ; a good strong workable loam will, as far as soil proper 

 is concerned, produce as good fruit as you can wish to see ; 

 neither is it its great depth that insures perfection, though 

 granted it is a magnificent permanent home for healthy root 

 action where this anchor of the tree is provided with such grand 

 feeding ground, it is the sun action on the ground, it is the thorough 

 ventilation of the soil which prevents morbid stagnation, and 



