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MISCELLANEOUS ADDRESSES . 267 
crop, and yet we go steadily on growing and showing the fancy 
kinds with the same honors and attentions as those that pay. 
As a people, we are prone to forget, and the memory of our 
blighted hopes, when unusually severe winters have destroyed 
our favorite trees, is growing dim. The lessons so sharply taught 
us heretofore must sometime be repeated on the tender varieties 
that the recent favorable seasons are leading us to plant. Whether 
it is to come the present cold winter or later, matters little, except 
that the sooner it comes the less our loss. But is it not our duty 
as public educators to strongly discriminate in favor of our most 
hardy and valuable kinds, by offering special premiums for best 
plates of each, instead of lor best collection of five, ten, or twenty 
kinds into which some that are inferior will always creep ? 
I have often wondered that with our present supply of good 
fruits, their use was not more general. Instead of being used 
irregularly, between meals, and at unseasonable hours, why are 
they not regularly upon our tables as a part of our daily food ? 
The present skill and facilities for drying, canning and cooking 
render this easy for the whole year. All consider them a luxury, 
none doubt their healthfulness or economy, and yet how sparingly 
are they used. 
Small fruits not being in season at the time of our general 
exhibition, there seems no better way to bring them into notice 
and test their merits than by premiums for best results as shown 
by written report, submitted to a proper committee. Such pre¬ 
mium l^st season called out but one response, but I believe 
another trial will do better, and I think the subject worthy of 
continued effort on our part. In former meetings, we have given 
but little time to the subject of timber planting. This, though 
not as necessary to Wisconsin as to her sister states, is still very 
important, and worthy of earnest consideration. Every farm 
should grow its own timber, but instead of this, thousands are 
hauling fuel and fencing from two to ten miles, and yet making 
no effort to remedy the evil. On many and even most farms there 
are waste places, ravines, or hillsides, or land too stony to plow, 
which would be beautified and improved by trees, and which 
might thus yield as good returns as the balance of the farm. 
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