38 
WISCONSIN HORTICULTURE 
December, 1918 
Horticulture, Its Place Among 
the Occupations of Men. 
(Lecture notes prepared by the late 
E. G. Goff, in 188H. See November 
Wisconsin Horticulture) 
We will next consider the place 
that horticulture occupies among 
the occupations of men. We have 
already said that the scope of 
horticulture includes the culture 
of fruits, vegetables, and orna- 
mental plants. This implies the 
production of certain articles 
needed or desired by man, and we 
see first that horticulture is 
(a.) A productive industry. 
I use the term productive in the 
sense of furnishing what we call 
raw materials, as distinguished 
from manufactured articles. 
These raw materials are furnished 
to commerce from various sources. 
They may come from the surface 
of the earth where they have been 
produced by nature, unaided by 
man, as in our primeval forests. 
The lumbering business is then 
one of our productive industries. 
They may come from the surface 
of the earth, where they have been 
produced by nature, aided by 
man’s protection and care, as in 
our agriculture. They may come 
from beneath the earth, where 
they have been deposited in past 
ages, as in our mining industries, 
or they may come from the water, 
where they are produced by na- 
ture, either with or without man’s 
assistance, as in our fisheries. 
In this, perhaps somewhat arbi- 
trary classification, we readily 
discover that horticulture is 
(b.) A branch of agriculture. 
We may next consider some of 
the relations of horticulture to 
the other branches of agriculture, 
and in order to do this, we will 
first consider what these branches 
are. Agriculture may be divided 
into four general divisions, viz. : 
Cereal production, or the growing 
of grain ; animal production, or 
the rearing of animals ; hoed crops, 
or the growing of corn, cotton, to- 
bacco ; horticulture, or the grow- 
ing of fruits, vegetables and or- 
namental plants. 
If we were to ask which of these 
branches of agriculture is most 
highly developed, it is probable 
that the honor would fall upon 
horticulture. In no other depart- 
ment do we find the products of 
the soil so much enhanced by la- 
bor and intelligence as in horti- 
culture. Skillful market garden- 
ers usually take two, often three 
and even four crops from the 
same ground each year. In all 
our large cities may be seen com- 
mercial green houses, comprising 
but a few hundred square feet of 
glass, and located on one or two 
city lots that yield larger incomes 
than the average prairie farm. In 
the suburbs of New York, fifty 
and even one hundred dollars per 
acre are often paid for the rent 
of land devoted to market garden- 
ing, and Mr. Henderson states 
that he finds it profitable to em- 
ploy on the average one man the 
year round to each acre of land 
devoted to gardening. Surely no 
other department of agriculture 
can show so much concentration 
of labor and capital. 
Again, in no other department 
of agriculture are the products of 
nature so much differentiated, 
that is, changed by art. To verify 
this fact it is only necessary to 
study the processes of propaga- 
tion in one of our large nurseries. 
We shall there find that almost 
every plant offered for sale is in a 
sense the product of art. The long 
rows of apple trees offered for 
sale are none of them growing on 
their own roots, but all have been 
either grafted or budded. Most 
of the varieties grown could not 
possibly be perpetuated under the 
purely natural methods of propa- 
gation, and many of them would 
never have been secured at all but 
by the aid of art. In the vicinity 
of large cities we may find the op- 
erations of gardening going on 
under glass during the entire win- 
ter, from which the markets are 
supplied with fresh vegetables 
while a frigid temperature pre- 
vails in all the external atmos- 
phere. 
As we shall see in our next 
chapter, there are reasons for be- 
lieving that horticulture is also 
the oldest branch of horticulture. 
Discussion of the Spray-Gun. 
To meet the growing popularity 
of the dry-dust method of apply- 
ing insecticides and fungicides, 
the manufacturers of liquid spray- 
ing machinery have designed the 
spray-gun. The spray-gun is a 
light, compact rod about two feet 
long, and so constructed that it 
will throw a large volume of spray 
material at high pressure. By 
opening the gun to its full capa- 
city a straight stream capable of 
being thrown a considerable dis- 
tance is produced; by shutting it 
down a cone-shaped spray is 
made. Different sized disks are 
supplied with each gun in order 
that the amount of material ap- 
plied may coincide with the capa- 
city of the spray pump. The ease 
and rapidity with which the dust 
can be applied makes it possible 
for growers, having a large acre- 
age to cover the trees in the few 
days in which certain insects may 
successfully be controlled. The 
spray-gun is intended to ansAver 
