The beginning of the Twentieth Century is marked as a period in which commercial affairs in agriculture are being more highly developed than ever before. Temporarily, the idea of making two blades of grass grow where one grew before is eclipsed by the idea that success in agriculture is quite as much dependent on business management as on large production. We need, then, in _The Peaches of New York_ to set down as precisely as possible, as a record of the times, the business side of peach-growing. This we conceive, so far as the fruit-grower is concerned, consists of matters having to do with growing, picking, grading, packing, cooling and shipping, while the affairs of the several go-betweens from producer to consumer belong to merchanting rather than orcharding. Not that the grower is without interest in the selling of his products--far from it. There is no better ballast to keep the fruit-dealer steady than knowledge of all of his dealings on the part of the fruit-grower. Among Caucasians green peaches have a bad reputation. Adage, prose and poetry bear witness that any curtailment of the sun's maturing function in this fruit is going against nature and makes an altogether unwholesome product. But in China and Japan the peach is habitually eaten green and hard. Fungi play such havoc with peaches in Oriental countries that the fruit must be devoured green or the crop is lost. A green peach is quite as palatable, nutritious and wholesome as a green olive. The ripe product of the one is just as superior to the green as is the other. All this not to point a moral or adorn a tale but to bring out the fact that the green peach is an edible fruit and that the annual performance of health inspectors in all large markets in condemning carloads of green peaches as unfit for food while green olives, apples, pears, plums, cherries and grapes pass muster, is an unjust discrimination against the peach. The peach is, of course, best when ripe, soft, melting and luscious, but so are all other fruits and all should be accorded the same treatment by consumers and health inspectors.