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Fruit Evaporation in America. 
It is a suggestive fact that there were no fruit-drying factories 
in America iifteen years ago, and none in California ten years 
ago. In the latter case a trade of nearly half a million sterling 
has been added to the previously existing industries of the State, 
and created out of what was formerly for the most part waste, 
viz., the many tons of fruit which, in pre-evaporator days, rotted 
before they could reach a market. 
Comparing the state of things, thus roughly disclosed, in two 
states of the Union, with what is being done to-day in our own 
country towards the culture, curing, and distribution of fruit, three 
things cannot be denied. 
Aside from certain limited areas, of which the Vale of Evesham 
furnishes a good example, the culture of fruit is stationary in 
England, curing by artificial heat is practically unknown, and dis- 
tribution is clumsy and costly. 
Devonshire, for instance, our chief apple-growing county, has 
added only a few hundred acres to her orchards during the last ten 
years. Her trees are, for the most part, old, of poor sorts, bearing 
small and inferior fruit, often decaying and moss-grown. They 
stand close together, the grass grows thick between them, and they 
are cultivated much in the same way now as they were a century 
ago. Meanwhile, it probably costs a Devonshire man more to send 
his apples to London than his American competitor pays for freight 
from New York or Boston to the same place. 
If we ask ourselves, " Whence the contrast between the two 
countries 1 " I think the answer must be twofold — Americans, 
generally, are more alert than their English competitors, more 
quick to see, and seize upon, new openings for trade ; while the 
American farmer is, in addition, a freeholder who cultivates his 
own soil. 
Following the advice of a recent speaker on this subject, himself 
a scientific and successful fruit-grower as well as a landowner, I for- 
bear from speculating on the question — " How far the fact of the 
American farmer being also an owner, has determined his greater 
success in this field of industry." But it must be remarked that 
the Vale of Evesham, already alluded to, where custom gives " the 
Cardeners," who are all tenants, not only an actual ownership of 
their improvements, but a practical ownership of the soil itself, is 
the site of a very prosperous fruit-growing industry, and the home 
of many well-to-do fruit -fanners. Is this due to sun, situation, and 
soil, — to three S's, or to three F's ? 
Dan. Pidgeon. 
