
          6.  [VI]

The descriptions and illustrations are not necessarily based on fruits
grown at Arlington Farm.  In fact few, if any, of the descriptions
are based on fruit grown there.  Many paintings of fruit grown there
were made, though many on file were made of fruit grown elsewhere.
Most, if not all the negatives listed, are of trees in the Arlington
Farm orchard.  These photographes [photographs] were made largely shortly before
the trees were pulled out.

After varietal notes had been made over as long a period of
years as seemed practicable and paintings had been made of most of
the varieties that seemed likely to be of value, together with the
fact that it had become necessary to reduce expenses as much as
possible, we began discarding the trees - to avoid spraying, pruning,
harvesting and other costs as much, and as fast as possible.

A final personal word.  The question may naturally arise
as to why these varietal notes have been compiled when they were
admittedly so fragmentary, mixed-up, and so many of them, even the
most of them perhaps, of such doubtful value - for it is, in truth
very questionable how much anyone definitely interested in apple
varieties would get from a review of any of these notes.

The facts are, at least from a personal standpoint, that the
Arlington Farm Variety Orchard was never so handled or utilized
as to justify its existence, in the writer's opinion.  The only
observations of any extent made and recorded on the varieties as
they grew here were those made by myself.  As fragmentary, interrupted
and incomplete as they were they constituted about all the
recorded information to come form this orchard.  In the form of the
origianl notes, they were practically nothing better than waste
paper to anyone not familiar with them - and no one other than myself
was in the least familiar with them. It therefore seemed to me, as
I looked towards my retirement from active service in September 1941,
that with my time not of much material value, it would be worth while,
even though the finished notes might never prove of any particular
value to anyone, for me to do what I could to compile the observations
I had recorded in some sort of connected shape so that they
could be placed on file where they might be available for any unlooked
for unpredictable and unlikely purpose whatsoever.  They will
exist as about the only evidence that the apple variety orchard at
Arlington Farm yielded anything of utilitarian or scientific value.
The probability that these note will ever prove of particular use to
anyone is admittedly so remove that had my time been of material
value, the amount of it required to compile them could not have bee
justified - this by way stating that I am fully aware of the fact that
I am making no particular contributuion to pomolgy in putting the
notes on permanenet file in somebody's book case.

[signature and date] H. P. Gould Nov. 10/43.
        