THIRTY-THIRD BIENNIAL SESSION 
RESPONSE FROM THE NORTH. 
25 
W. T. Macoun, Canada. 
Coming as I do from the Capital of Canada, the city of Ot- 
tawa, which is sometimes called “the Washington of the North,” 
it is a great inspiration to me to come to this beautiful Capital of the United 
States, and to feel that some time we will have a more beautiful capital than 
you have — because we believe that in Ottawa, Canada, we have a situation 
with which yours cannot be compared. The scenery about there is mag- 
nificent, and when our city is laid out as it should be — and I think that it 
soon will be — I hope that all of you who are here present will come and visit 
it, visit and see for yourselves what a beautiful place it is and what a beau- 
tiful country Canada is. We are glad to say that many of you have done so 
already. 
The gentleman from the South has referred to the “Sunny South;” but 
I would not exchange with him for a minute the glorious Canada winter for 
the misery and enervating heat of the Sunny South. (Laughter and applause.) 
But I do not like to say too much about the horrors of the South in winter; but 
we have had some of our Canadians going down there for a pleasant time 
in winter, and they have come back to enjoy our winter more than ever they 
had done before. And then there is the glorious spring in Canada. It comes 
with a burst, quite different it seems to me from anything over here in the 
United States. When the snow melts and the ice has been broken and drifted 
out to sea, and the rills and rivers sing their anthem of the Easter and the 
radiant spring, we all feel like jumping about and doing the best we can to 
make things go. Now I cannot imagine anything more delightful. For me 
at least, there is no desire to be any further south than Canada. 
We had the good fortune to have the meeting of the American Pomolog- 
ical Society in Canada just four years ago; and it is not necessary for me to 
expatiate on the crops of Canada, your members saw the evidence of it then 
in the production of fruits. We think we have a quality that is great in the 
North; not only in Canada but this is true in the northern tiers of the 
United States. There are the biggest apples, the best pears, plums, grapes, 
cherries, currants, gooseberries, raspberries and the best strawberries that 
can be grown anywhere. I think those who have seen and tasted them will 
agree with me. Canada is now growing all these to a very large extent. I 
cannot take time at present to give you figures, but I could give you some 
very striking ones. We have in the North a gradual development of fruit 
culture northward and we expect in the future to have fruit growing 
near the Arctic Circle. It may interest you to know that the first apples 
produced in latitude 58° came to us just two years ago. There we have a 
temperature that gets to 64° below zero several times in winter; 58° is not 
an uncommon temperature. It is often 58° below zero, or 90° of freezing, and 
yet we have apples being produced there — not of a very large size at present 
but we expect in the future to have quite large ones. 
When you consider that the native home of the crab apple is in the very 
northern parts of Russia and in Siberia, you can understand what a great 
opportunity there is for the development of varieties in comparatively warm 
