with equal care put into the barrels in which it is
to be kept or transported. The barrel should be slightly shaken and
filled entirely full. Let it stand open two days, to allow the fruit to
sweat and throw off the excessive moisture. Then head up tight, and keep
in a cool open shed until freezing weather; then keep where they can
occasionally have good air, and in as cool a place as possible, without
danger of freezing. Of all the methods of keeping apples on shelves,
buried as potatoes, in various other articles, as chaff, sawdust, &c.,
this is, on the whole, the best and cheapest. Wrapping the apples in
paper before putting them into the barrels, may be an improvement.
Apples gathered just before hard frosts, or as they are beginning to
ripen, but before many have fallen from the trees, and packed as above,
and the barrels laid on their sides in a good dry, dark cellar, where
air can occasionally be admitted, can be kept in perfection from six to
eight weeks, after the ordinary time for their decay. Apples for cider,
or other immediate use, may be shaken off upon mats or blankets spread
under the tree for that purpose. They are not quite so valuable, but it
saves times in gathering.

_Varieties_ are exceedingly numerous and uncertain. Cole estimates that
two millions of varieties have been produced in the single state of
Maine, and that thousands of kinds may there be found superior to those
generally recommended in the fruit-books. The minute description of
fruits is not of the least use to one out of ten thousand cultivators.
The best pomologists differ in the names and descriptions of the various
fruits. Some varieties have as many as twenty-five synonyms. Of what
use, then, is the minute description of the hundred and seventy-seven
varieties of Cole's American fruit-book, or of the vast numbers
described by Downing, Elliott, Barry, and Hooper? The best pear we saw
in Illinois could not be identified in Elliott's fruit-book by a
practical fruit-grower. We had in our orchard in Ohio a single
apple-tree, producing a large yield of one of the very best apples we
ever saw; it was called Natural Beauty. We could not learn from the
fruit-books what it was. We took it to an amateur cultivator of thirty
years' experience, and he could not identify it. This is a fair view of
the condition of the nomenclature of fruits. The London experimental
gardens are doing much to systemize it, and the most scientific growers
are con