We feel in our seasonable hints this month, like making a full plea for better gardening all along the line. As the Secretary of the Worcester County (Mass.) Horticultural Society somewhere says: to take up many of our so-called horticultural writings, a stranger would be apt to think that its mission was fulfilled, when we had produced a Thimbleberry; or that the acme had been reached when some pioneer along the Mississippi stumbled on the Wild Goose Plum. Very few of our new fruits are equal in value to the older ones they have displaced. Something that is tough and hardy and will grow without a thought and without a care - a raspberry that is so full of seeds and has so little pulp, that it will prove a "first-rate carrying berry" - a strawberry that will ripen its whole crop in a day or two, so that there can be economy in gathering - a peach that will never ripen, so that we may get it to market before it rots - these be the favorites of the day. Now, all this and more is very well. There should be a paying profitable side to fruit growing. Our magazine does all it can to aid and advance it.

But surely this is not the be all, the end all of fruit culture ! If we have the time and the will to grow a delicious plum, why should we forever have to be satisfied with some compound of tannic acid and mashed turnips, simply because it will not pay the market man to fight the curculio in the only way it can be fought? Why have nothing but a "good cropper" and one that is "locally adapted" to take care of itself - because a much better thing costs some time and trouble to care for?

But we sometimes think that even the market man does not do himself justice in his race for new fruits.

In his efforts for the nimble penny, he forgets that there is often much more substance in the slower sixpence. In some departments where a slower result is a necessity, really new and good varieties, improvements on the old, are overlooked.

It must have been for some time apparent to far-seeing orchardists, that our cultivators are not keeping pace with progress, as they should do. It is a notorious fact that a large number of our best orchards do not yield as they once did; varieties once popular are popular no more; and the eminent place which American apples once held in European markets is becoming filled by the apples of Canada, and especially of Nova Scotia. Apple orchards give out much sooner than they used to do - fruit does not keep as well as it did - and the flavor of even popular kinds is not equal to the past. There are exceptions, but the undoubted tendency is in these directions. Apple growers are, we think, slow to adopt new notions that may advantage them. New varieties are certainly not in their vein. There have been innumerable good kinds introduced during the past quarter of a century, some of which are better, and would certainly be more profitable if some good judgment were to follow up and make good use of them.

The old stale kinds are yet the ones we find in our markets, and the good new ones are comparatively unknown.

Last season while looking at some apple trees on the grounds of an amateur in North-eastern Pennsylvania, and noting the wonderful beauty, productiveness, and healthy vigor of some comparatively unknown kinds, we wondered whether there would ever be any way to make them well-known to the general cultivator; and whether we were to be forever dependent on the old threadbare kinds? There were Huttensteins, York Imperials, Prinz and Water apples, certainly superior in manifold ways to many everybody wants to grow, and yet few know of them.

We think the modern agency system has much to do with the slow progress in improved knowledge. In old times the planter would visit the nursery himself, see the fruit in the specimen orchard, and judge for himself. Not a quarter of those who would once visit a nursery, go there now. Numbers never go at all, and all they know of fruits is what the glib-tongued traveling agent tells them. The agency plan has its good features; some - hundreds - have fruit trees, who never would enjoy this pleasure under the old system. But it is not favorable to the progress of improvement, and this we must all regret.

Large numbers of nurserymen now have no specimen orchard at all, and those who have, take far less interest in them than in former times, because there are so few friends to enjoy the pleasure with them. We strongly advise our friends, at this planting season, to get a tree or two each wherever they can, of some of the most promising kinds, and try for themselves how they will do. It may be that they will be glad to have the material to top-graft a whole orchard with the better kinds some day.