55. Fruit grown in a new country is often fair.--Every horticulturist knows that apples grown in a new country, that is suited to them, are healthy and fair; but, sooner or later, the scab, and codling moth, and bitter rot, and bark louse arrive, each to begin its particular mode of attack. Peach trees in new places, remote from others, are often easily grown and free from dangers; but soon will arrive the yellows, borers, leaf curl, rot, and other enemies. For a few years plums may be grown, in certain new localities, without danger from curculio, or rot, or shot-hole fungus. It has long been known that the nicest way to grow a few cabbages, radishes, squashes, cucumbers, or potatoes is to plant a few here and there in good soil, at considerable distances from where any have heretofore been grown. For a time enemies are not likely to find them. I have often noticed that, while pear-blight decimated or swept large portions of a pear orchard, a few isolated trees, scattered about the neighborhood, usually remain healthy. The virgin soil of the Dakotas produced, at a trifling cost, healthy, clean wheat, but it was not long before the Russian thistle, false flax, and other pests followed, to contest their rights to the soil. As animals starve out, in certain seasons when food is scarce, or more likely migrate to regions which can afford food, so plants desert worn-out land and seek fresh fields. As animals retreat to secluded and isolated spots to escape their enemies, so, likewise, many plants accomplish the same thing by sending out scouts in all directions to find the best places; these scouts, it is needless to say, are seeds, and when they have found a good place, they occupy it, without waiting for further instructions. 56. Much remains to be discovered.--"In this, as in other branches of science, we have made a beginning. We have learned just enough to perceive how little we know. Our great masters in natural history have immortalized themselves by their discoveries, but they have not exhausted the field; and if seeds and fruits cannot vie with flowers in the brilliance and color with which they decorate our gardens and our fields, still they surely rival them--it would be impossible to excel them--in the almost infinite variety of the problems they present to us, the ingenuity, the interest, and the charm of the beautiful contrivances which they offer for our study and our admiration."[5] [Footnote 5: _Flowers, Fruits, and Leaves_, by Sir John Lubbock, p. 96.]