CONFEEENCE ON FRUIT GROWING. 



77 



itself always has been, and always will be, the work of the individual, 

 and not of committees. 



Under the director of an experimental station there should be, besides 

 the ground manager, workers in at least three different branches of science : 

 the chemist, investigating the problems connected with the composition of 

 soils, of the trees, and of the fruits ; the entomologist, investigating 

 insect pests ; and the mycologist, investigating fungoid diseases. Each 

 - of these should have a laboratory in which to carry on his work ; but, in 

 the case of the entomologist and the mycologist, much of the work 

 would have to be done out of doors, and in different parts of the 

 kingdom ; for insects and fungi will not be found so accommodating as 

 to come to the experimental station in order to be studied and ex- 

 terminated ; they will have to be followed into the plantation which they 

 have attacked, and studied on the scene of their active operations. 



It is not, however, in these two branches of science only that the 

 operations of an experimental station should be extended into other 

 parts of the country. In what may be called the department of " cultural 

 experiments " — those on planting, manuring, pruning, and the practical 

 treatment of trees in every respect — extension and repetition in other 

 soils will be requisite. However necessary a central station may be, it 

 must always be remembered (indeed, it is never forgotten by those who 

 seek a cheap method of discrediting the results obtained there) that the 

 conditions of soil, position and climate in one locality can never be 

 reproduced exactly in any other, and that, therefore, the results obtained 

 in one spot may be peculiar to the special circumstances prevailing 

 locally, and, consequently, may not be generally applicable. 



We must also remember that experiments at a horticultural ex- 

 periment-station must necessarily be made on a very small scale ; it 

 would be necessary to take many hundreds or thousands of trees for 

 each experiment in order to eliminate effectually the chance peculiarities 

 of the individual trees, and to make horticultural experiments com- 

 parable in this respect with agricultural ones ; but an experimental station 

 on such a scale would, in this country at any rate, be out of the question ; 

 and, therefore, the experiments made at the station must always be 

 regarded to a certain extent as preliminary or tentative. The station, 

 in fact, bears the same relation to the fruit industry as does a works - 

 laboratory to a large manufactory. In each of them all sorts of 

 questions are investigated, and all sorts of experiments are made, which 

 could never be made on a large scale without the risk of serious com- 

 mercial loss, and the dislocation of all routine work. It is only in the 

 case of a small number of the experiments made in a works- laboratory 

 that results are obtained which promise to be of practical value, and it 

 is only after such processes have been thoroughly examined there, that 

 they should be tried on a practical scale in the works themselves. In a 

 precisely similar way, a few only of the results obtained at an experi- 

 mental station can be expected to lead to results of importance, and 

 these, after having been worked out on an experimental scale, must be 

 submitted to examination on a practical fruit-growing basis. 



This, however, does not necessarily imply that the station itself should 

 be possessed of large areas of land in different parts of the country in 



