See what you have done!  You have clothed the barrenness of the dreary plain with gardens, orchards and forests.  You have been at work with God and glorified a vast empire, and now he has blessed the work of your hands.  Instead of the air sodden with tears and tremulous with the wail of widows and orphans, you are welcomed with the joy of children and the delight of mothers.  All along the lines of progress you receive the most cordial ovations, and when you pass on to the land where “everlasting spring abides”, may you receive the royal welcome, “Well done, good and faithful servant.”

The Newer Fruits in 1915 and How Secured.

PROF.  N. E. HANSEN, STATE COLLEGE, BROOKINGS, SOUTH DAKOTA.

Mr. Hansen:  Mr. President and Fellow Members:  This subject is not an entirely satisfactory one this year owing to the fact that we lost about three sets of tomato plants from frost, the last frost coming the ninth of June.  These conditions, of course, are unusual, but it prevented the fruiting of a lot of new fruit seedlings which appeared promising.  However, I decided to propagate two new plums because they had borne several excellent crops.  One of these is a very late plum of good quality, with flesh of peculiar crisp texture, which ripens after all the other plums, about a week before frost.  It is a combination of the Wolf plum with the Kansas sand plum (Prunus Watsoni).  The tree is of late dwarf habit but very productive, and its late season may give it a place.

Another plum which I decided to place in propagation is a hybrid of the wild plum of Manitoba with the Japanese plum.  The mother tree was raised from wild plum pits received from Manitoba a few years ago.  These bear very freely and are the earliest of the native plums.  The tree is of low, dwarf habit.  The fruit is not as large as my Waneta, which is a hybrid of the largest native plum, the Terry, (Prunus Americana), with the Apple, one of the best of Burbank’s Japanese plums.  But since the range of the plum Manitoba is so far north, it may give greater hardiness where that is needed.  At any rate, it is of interest to know that the Manitoba native plum can be mated with the Japanese plum.

Pears constitute my favorite line at present.  “What can I do for hardy pears?” is a question I have been asked many times.  The prairie northwest cannot raise pears owing to the cold or the blight.  In my travels in Asia, including four tours of exploration in Siberia, I made a business of buying up basketfuls of pears in Manchuria, Mongolia, Western China and Eastern Siberia and saving the seed, giving the flesh away to the coolies, who were glad always to get the fruit.  These have raised me many seedlings.  In addition I have imported a lot of pears from Russia.

[Illustration:  Pyrus Simoni

The hardy, blight-proof sand pear used by Prof.  N.E.  Hansen in breeding pears for the Northwest.  A careful study of our eastern Arctic pears has been made recently by Mr. Alfred Rehder, botanist at Arnold Arboretum, and this form of sand pear is now called Pyrus Ovoidea instead of Pyrus Sinensis, or Pyrus Simoni.]