458 
STATE HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY, 
we should strike these from our lists, should we or our custo- 
mers suffer loss or inconvenience? Would it,not rather be 
the removal of a burden ? True, the enthusiastic amateur or 
nurseryman may take pride in his thirty or fifty kinds, as a 
collection, but this has little to do with the raising of trees or 
fruit for profit or as a means of support. 
In consideration of their early maturity, and success in 
nearly all localities, I am led to think that we give the small 
fruits too little attention. I do not mean the wonderful nov¬ 
elties that flood us in such abundance, but the older and well 
proved. . A few years ago, a brother nurseryman raised as an 
objection to going more largely into small fruits that, to make 
sales, we must be constantly getting up something new. In 
practice, I have not found this so. As an instance in proof I 
will mention grape, cherry and currant varieties, twenty years 
in our hands, yet of these we have demand for 80,00 to 40,- 
000 annually, and have never yet had enough. Again, in 
strawberries, the demand for Wilson’s is for thousands, while 
Jucundas, Agriculturist, and all the big guns of the past five 
years, are sold only by dozens or hundred. It would seem to 
me to be sound sense, a help to our business, and a benefit to 
the country, to take a few of the best varieties, in each class 
and push them with the same energy that the novelties are 
pushed. True, we get an occasional grain of wheat from all 
this over-praised chaff. But, instead of pushing along both 
chaff and wheat to our customers, and thereby taxing and dis¬ 
appointing them, should we not ultimately gain both’ honor and 
money by taking time to separate them, and selling only the 
grain ? 
On the departure of one of our best nurserymen to an en¬ 
larged field of labor, I asked him if the trquble of his present 
work were not enough ? If he must needs undertake a thing so 
much larger as to kill him outright? I think his reply hits, 
and should enlighten nearly or quitp all of us. It was as fol¬ 
lows : “I have thus far been a slave to my busines, being field- 
worker, foreman, salesman, packer, book-keeper, and porter; I 
am now going to a business that can support a man for each of 
