FLORIDA STATE HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY 
41 
If you read the address of Mr. William 
Sproule, President of the Southern Pa¬ 
cific Railway before the Western Fruit 
Jobbers Convention you will note that he 
states as follows: 
“It is not the fruit that is sold on the 
great avenues of our great cities which 
makes a fruit season prosperous. It is the 
distribution of fruit amongst the tens of 
thousands in the side streets of our cities 
and directly from the peddlers’ wagons. 
In other words, the success or failure of 
a fruit season depends on the ability of 
the countless thousands to buy the fruit.” 
Do traffic officials of Florida lines re¬ 
alize conditions confronting the grape¬ 
fruit industry? Will they come to its 
aid and keep it from going back? The 
facts were laid before them by the Florida 
Growers and Shippers League at the St. 
Augustine meeting, March 18, 1915. 
The grapefruit acreage is here and in 
condition to produce an enormous and 
constantly increasing tonnage of highly 
desirable freight. It is not reasonable 
for railroad officials to think that grape¬ 
fruit growers will continue to keep up 
properties merely for the sake of grind¬ 
ing out revenue for the railroads. 
Many of us witnessed and suffered from 
the destruction of our citrus properties 
by the freezes of 1894-95, and succeeding 
cold years. These were acts of Provi¬ 
dence and beyond human control. We 
do' not want to again see the citrus ter¬ 
ritory of Florida disfigured with deserted 
and neglected grapefruit groves, brought 
about by the failure of transportation in¬ 
terests to take proper action. 
We want our industries to prosper in 
order to attract to our future develop¬ 
ment outside capital and a desirable class 
of settlers. To do this our products must 
have wider and better distribution, which 
can largely be brought about by more 
reasonable freight charges to remote 
markets. 
S. C. Inman, Florence Villa, Fla. 
Mr. President, Ladies and Gentlemen: 
It is no little honor to be accorded the 
privilege of addressing so representative 
and intelligent an audience as is here as¬ 
sembled, and would that I were capable 
of doing justice to you and the occasion. 
The subject assigned me, “Methods of 
Handling and Packing Citrus Fruit,” 
would probably be more satisfactorily dis¬ 
cussed by an experienced packing house 
manager. 
By reference to Reports of Proceedings 
of previous meetings of this Society, over 
a period of several years back, we find 
that this topic has been very exhaustively 
handled by those far abler, hence I have 
no new ideas to hand you. 
The various bulletins and other litera¬ 
ture which have been published from time 
to time, giving results of scientific re¬ 
search, conducted by government experts, 
Messrs. Powell, Tenny, Ramsey and 
others, furnish us abundance of indisput¬ 
able data, showing that by far the greatest 
portion of the decay which besets our fruit 
is the result of mechanical injury, per¬ 
mitting infection by the fungus, common¬ 
ly known as blue mold. 
These same authorities have demon¬ 
strated too, that fruit which has not been 
mechanically injured is not greatly prone 
to decay, and may be shipped to distant 
