The Apple-Tree, by L. H. Bailey. 
The MacMillan Co., New York. 
The Apple-Tree is the first of a series of Open Country 
Books to be published hy the MacMillan Co. Others are 
promised "about weather and the sky, scenery, camps, recrea- 
tion, quadrupeds, fishes, birds, insects, reptiles, plants and the 
places in the open. ' ' 
This series will make a library in itself, but if all the 
promised books come up to this little volume on the Apple-tree 
in interest, practical value and accessibility of knowledge, the 
MacMillan Co. will have done a splendid thing for the lovers of 
out-of-doors. The volume is small and light and easy for 
the hand to hold. 
The history and care of the Apple-tree from seedling to old 
age is told with clearness, with absorbing interest, with in- 
escapable information, and told too with poetry and affection. 
Prof. Bailey's description of an Apple is almost a song, and his 
appeal for amateur Apple-growing has so much reason in it 
that I shall quote : 
"The fruit adapts itself to the hand. The fingers close 
pleasantly over it, fitting its figure. It has a solid feel. The 
flesh of a good apple is crisp, breaking, melting, coolly acid or 
mildly sweet. It has a fracture, as one bites it, possessed by no 
other fruit! One likes to feel the snap and break of it. There 
is a stability about it that satisfies; it holds its shape till the 
last bite. One likes to linger on an apple, to sit by a fireside to 
eat it, to munch it waiting on a log when there is no hurry, to 
have another apple with which to invite a friend." 
Here is true poetry. Amy Lowell at her best never produced 
anything more convincing, or a truer picture. 
Eef erring to the amateur, he says : 
"The days of the amateur fruit-grower seem to be passing. 
At least we do not hear much of them in society or in many of 
the meetings of horticulturists. There may be many reasons — 
but two are evident; we give the public indifferent fruits and 
thereby neither educate the taste or stimulate the desire for 
more; we do not provide them places from which they can get 
plants of many of the choicest things. Yet on a good amateur 
interest in fruits depends, in the end, the real success of com- 
mercial fruit growing. Just now we are trying to increase the 
consumption of Apples — to lead the people to eat an Apple a 
day. It cannot be accomplished by the customary commercial 
methods. To eat an Apple a day is a question of affections and 
emotions." 
Prof. Bailey lays emphasis upon the importance of amateur 
interest. He says: 
"The amateur is the embodiment of the best in the common 
life, the conserver of aspirations, the fulfillment of democratic 
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