Philadelphia is the Metropolitan City of a grand old State, one which not only furnishes all the anthracite coal and the best of iron to the sisterhood of States, but, according to the United States Census Report of 1881, her farmers bring her to a commanding position as an agricultural State, ranking - first in rye; second in hay, buckwheat and potatoes; third in oats and tobacco; fourth in milch cows; seventh in sheep; fifth in the number of farms - these last numbering two hundred and fourteen thousand. Thus, may Phila-delphians be proud of Pennsylvania's position in an agricultural way based, firstly, upon the wealth of money her products bring to the pockets of her farmers and, secondly, to the noble position she occupies in providing food for mankind - she is an Empire! One of our most gifted men said, "Agriculture feeds us, to a great extent clothes us; without it we should not have manufactures, and we should not have commerce."

In an agricultural community no man occupies a more important position than he who provides seed-stock of esculents and cereals for his fellow-agriculturists. If of good quality and well selected, he is a public benefactor - if impure, his carelessness or ignorance entails a loss falling directly or indirectly upon every one. Seed farming is in this view the most important of agricultural pursuits, and upon it I propose to draw some reflections, but will first briefly touch upon the subject of market-gardening.

Gardening like other pursuits had its origin in the supply of primitive wants; these increasing, with development on every hand, its details extended till the "gooseberry bush and cabbage," which comprehended a garden in the eyes of Lord Walpole, over-lept the fence and went abroad into the fields to out rank in its money returns acre for acre any other agricultural pursuit. Vegetables are among the most important of foods, being alike used by rich and poor. To a colonist they are invaluable, and when he makes a garden and has plants in growth he begins to feel himself again; 'tis evidence of ownership; he has made wild nature his servant. Socrates said, "It is the source of health, strength, plenty, riches, and honest pleasure." An eminent English writer said, "It is amid its scenes and pursuits that life flows pure, the heart more calmly beats." The same idea expressive of the pleasure of a country life is conveyed in the words of another English worthy of ancient days; this party was like many of the "cits" who now-a-days visit our friends in the Jerseys. "Who so valueth or eateth with so keen a relish the peach he buyeth of the stall-woman in a market, as that which he gathereth after great pains and perhaps peril encountered in the search."

The Romans introduced into England their styles of gardening, but with their expulsion the art, if art it was, was lost. It was not till near the reign of Henry VIII, 1547, that cabbages, salads, carrots, turnips and many other esculents were successfully grown in Holland. Queen Catherine, it is reported, used to send a special messenger to Holland when she wanted a salad. It must have been stale when she got it! Peas were first brought into England in the time of Elizabeth, a quaint writer of that age remarking, " Peas brought from Holland are fit dainties for ladies, they come so far and cost so dear."

British gardening which principally took the form of ornate horticultural embellishment, may be said to have been greatly developed under Elizabeth, a little over three hundred years ago. Not till the reign of George II, one hundred and fifty years ago, was it worthy of much notice, but under his successor it was more fully developed, especially as respects the culture of esculent vegetables, much stimulated by seeds and plants sent over from the American Colonies. It is said this strange and wonderful wealth of plants, a new creation, was the impulse that developed English styles of landscape gardening, about which the English poet Grey, said, " Our skill in gardening, or rather laying out grounds, is the only taste we can call our own, the only proof of original talent in the matters of pleasure." This English poet certainly was a truthful man. Thus it will readily be perceived, that though gardening is the most ancient of the pursuits of man, it was certainly carried on in a very simple manner up to one hundred and fifty years ago; indeed, all garden seeds used in England were obtained from Holland up to the year 1700.

The first work on English gardening was published by Thomas Tasser, who in 1758 enumerated one hundred and fifty species of garden plants, introducing them as follows : "Seedes and Herbs for the Kychen, Herbs and Rootes for salletts and sawce, Herbes and Roots tuboile or tubutter, Stewing Herbs of all sortes, Herbes, branches and flours for windowes and pots, Herbs to still in summer, Necessarie Herbs to grow in the garden for Physic not reherst before."

Anterior to the American Revolution, the settlers in the Colonies sent abroad to their friends for their supply of seeds, and in those days their wants were very simple; quite one-half of the vegetables now used being then unknown - it was before the days of tomatoes, egg plants, sugar corn and okra, - squashes, watermelons and canteloupes were very rare and of such families of plants as were in use the members were of very limited numbers and such, indeed, as would to-day be considered of very poor development. The total number of exotics in England up to this date did not much exceed one thousand species, but about that time the gardener was abroad and the number rapidly arose to five thousand. Up to 1737 the classification of plants was not scientific, but an inharmonious system prevailed, which was so much improved upon by the immortal Linnaeus, that he is looked upon the world over as the elevator of botany into a science, and giving an impetus to agricultural and horticultural affairs, far exceeding all efforts preceding his day.

His investigations and those of others swept away a mass of ignorance connected with vegetable physiology and put the cultivator on a plane of higher thought and action.

The noise of the guns of the Revolution had hardly died away, when in 1784 the first seed establishment in America was founded at Philadelphia by David Landreth; seven acres then being considered an area quite sufficient to meet the demand for seeds and plants. The originator of that enterprise laid the foundation so solidly that his grandsons to-day continue the business, now in its one hundred and first year !

At various intervals other seed firms have sprung into existence, in Philadelphia, till now there are in this city eight or nine well-known firms. Thus Philadelphia to-day holds, as it always has, the preeminence in the seed business - leading all other cities in the Union both in the aggregate of seeds sold and, better still, in quality of stock - due to its situation amidst countless market gardeners, a culture inaugurated by the early Swedish colonists, whose descendants to-day follow the pursuits of their fathers; constituting the most discriminating class of market-gardeners to be found anywhere.

In a horticultural sense Philadelphia has always been famous - for many years the largest city and the most wealthy - people of means and leisure were attracted to it as a most agreeable residence; and thus were reared those old historic country homes which, circling round, lent such a charm that no praises were too high for the lips and pens of men famous during the last century - Washington, the poet Moore, Lafayette, Talleyrand, Baron Steuben and Louis Philippe.

Situated on the fertile banks of the Delaware, the city is surrounded in every direction by market-gardens - we should say market-farms, to better illustrate the extent - the chain extending over Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware and Mary-land. Soils under summer sun producing vegetables of the semi-tropics as well as of the more temperate zones, pouring into the city's markets a rich return for seeds distributed, each farmer on the constant watch for some accidental development, or sport of nature as it is termed, exceeding its parent in earliness of maturity, weight, color, form or flavor. None of the markets of Europe present such a range of esculent foods as do these of Philadelphia. In England the only good vegetables are the blanched sprouts of perennial plants, and potatoes, turnips, cauliflowers, lettuce and cabbage, the three latter full of slugs. Their peas are tough, beans stringy, tomatoes flavorless, melons squashy, vegetable marrows miserable.

Nowhere in the world is such an acreage of vegetable farmers as those looking to Philadelphia for their seed supplies. The southern half of New Jersey is in proper rotation almost all devoted to trucking, and this section comprises three million acres of land. One and one-third million acres including all Delaware and the Eastern Shore counties of Maryland forms the peach growing peninsula, at the base of which stands Philadelphia, and is as largely devoted to trucking as to peach growing. To this add the countless vegetable growers in the four Pennsylvania counties adjacent to Philadelphia, and we have an area of five million acres of land suitable for vegetable farming and on a very large part of which the business is pursued, practically and profitably. The vegetable crops are varied in themselves, and are alternated with fruit, grain and grass, the rotation bringing around in proper time the culture in truck of nearly the entire acreage. Southern New Jersey has been called the " vegetable garden " of the Union. It possesses everything to insure success, soil, climate, natural fertilizers, almost limitless rail and water communications to almost limitless markets.

The system of diversified agricultures as carried on in Jersey has transformed the peninsula portion of the State from a wilderness of piney barrens to almost an unbroken truck patch. Esculent vegetables, fruits, berries, grapes and wine making, and now every indication of successful sugar making, affording a system of culture broad enough to ensure success, let the climatic fluctuations of the seasons be what they may.

It may not be out of place to briefly refer to the developing pursuits of sugar making from the cane of early amber and early orange sorghum, and as an example of what can be done by the market-gardeners of New Jersey, Prof. Cook, of the New Jersey Agricultural State Board, reports that " One field of twenty acres, produced over 252 tons, from which were derived 24,060 pounds of salable sugar and 14,000 gallons of best quality syrup. The total yield of sugar as returned was 319,944 pounds, to which is to be added 40,000 gallons of dense syrup, worth at wholesale thirty-eight cents a gallon. The purity of the juice was remarkable, the co-efficient of purity of single canes being as high as ninety-two per cent while the average was at no time, less than eighty one."

The appellation "Jerseymen" is indeed synonymous with market-gardener, so general is that pursuit in the State. Hundreds of thousands of tons of vegetables grown from the seed distributed from Philadelphia, never enter that city even in transit; they are sent by steamer and sailing vessel to the ports on our Northern and Eastern coasts, New York to Halifax, and by rail to the cities of the West. Immense quantities of tomatoes and sugar corn are canned to be shipped to the uttermost parts; and to illustrate will here state that 1,100,000 bushels of tomatoes were sealed up into cans in the State of New Jersey alone, and in Delaware, Maryland and Pennsylvania 1,477,000 bushels; again, New Jersey puts up an immense quantity of salted green pickles, Burlington county alone salting over 100,000 bushels - incredible some might say, but nevertheless correct. One grower and canner of sugar corn in Maryland plants 2500 acres annually, sealing and distributing the crop wherever commerce extends. The product known equally well at Hammerfest, the most northern city in the world, as at Cape Town the most southern.

Horticulture, one of the most important of the domestic and refining arts, first among other specialties comprehends the growth of esculent vegetables, has, it will be perceived, so extended as to require large areas of farm lands, and it is difficult now to distinguish between the Horticulturist and the Agriculturist - some market-gardeners cultivating up to seven hundred acres.

The farm-gardener has an interesting pursuit in his culture of vegetables, one offering a rare opportunity to the observing mind; the ever-changing influences of heat and cold, wet and drought, fertility and barrenness, producing effects which some time seized upon by the intelligent grower puts him for a time a way ahead of his competitors. Gardening is an art worthy of the pursuit of the most intelligent mind; it is a scientific study every day; its scope has been enlarged during the past thirty years by the discoveries in vegetable nutrition, the chemical constituents of plants, soils and fertilizers, vegetable physiology and botanical affiliations; these all make high farming a science, and one of the most delightful. The hand of man directed by practical and scientific experience laying, as it were, at the feet of nature such materials as nature can take hold of and shape in her own forms. The farm is a laboratory where man is an active agent.

The successful market-gardener must unite the qualifications of the trucker, farmer, merchant and philosopher, for he must investigate the laws of vegetation as well as the laws of sale. Advanced market-gardening, thus it will be seen, is a technical pursuit and one requiring considerable means and a consideration of costs may not be out of place. The capital required in market-gardening far exceeds ordinary farming. The suburban market-gardens about Philadelphia are only worked at double the expense of others more remote - quite five hundred dollars per acre being the capital necessary to stock and conduct them.

This extraordinary expense is somewhat balanced by the frequency with which such gardeners can send their vegetables to market, and the fresh condition in which they are delivered; whereas the distant country gardener has to consign his produce to commission men, taking such prices as the market affords under forced sales.

High as may seem the estimate of $500 per acre as necessary capital, it is nothing compared with the expenses of some market-gardeners near London and Paris. Land on the outskirts of those cities rents for $200 and $300 per acre, often twice that much. In the suburbs of Paris the writer has visited a market-garden of three acres which annually pays a rental of $1800 and yet affords a large profit to its intelligent cultivator.

From this hasty review of market-gardening one readily perceives that in it is invested a deal of capital guided by intelligence and technical experience. Success, however, hinges firstly upon the purity of the seeds sown, and it is here the seedsman enters the arena as an active participant - one wielding an immense power for good or evil.

Seedsmen may be divided into two classes - merchants and seed growers.

The grower of seeds must be, first of all, an able gardener or else he will fail in the beginning, for he must do all that the trucker does and then he is only half way through; he must await, after the development of a vegetable fit for market, the slow production of seed. He is thus twice a cultivator, running twice the risks of a market gardener, wet and drought, heat and cold, tornado and insect injuries, insufficient or excessive fertility. The intelligent seed grower, recognizing the superiority of individual plants in physical characteristics and in potency of seed, the results sometimes of nature's sports and at other times of cross-fertilization, selects them from his general crop, and breeds up varieties of old species sometimes so distinct as hardly to be recognized. But he must not breed too high; he must bring to the culture of his crop of seed, if not scientific, at least very practical observations upon the subject of sterility, a condition so very frequently showing itself under systems of high culture, over-feeding and interbreeding - these influences producing an excessive growth of tissue, abortive flowers, and consequently little seed.

Many seed crops take fourteen to fifteen months from the sowing until harvest; for instance, cabbages, cauliflower, beet, parsnip, carrots, salsify, celery, onion, parsley and many others, all have to be sown during spring months, April and May, and do not produce their seed until the second July or August following. All these vegetables, perfect for domestic purposes, being developed the autumn of the year in which they are sown, but the genera being of biennial forms they have to be carried over to obey nature's laws. Thus the seed farmer is, we say, twice a cultivator and subject to extended injurious influences which do not attach to market-gardening.

Under these conditions the reader will perceive that seed farming cannot every year be a success. There is a certainty of some influences being detrimental to some crops, some being better developed by moisture, some by moderate heat, others by tropical sun. In no location can all crops be grown equally well. As a farmer well knows that certain parts of his farm are better suited for certain crops than others, so the seed grower knows that different counties in different States have their particular advantages.

The seed grower, wherever he be found, will be recognized among the more advanced farmers of his section. To be successful he must have made many steps forward; he must have best land, implements and barns; he must spend money freely for fertilizers and wages; he must be a student of nature and a good administrator, for his plans must be laid further ahead than those of any ordinary farmer, and further than most merchants.

Within the past twenty years seed farming in the United States has taken an extraordinary growth; for before that time seed farmers could almost be counted on the fingers; now specialists in the seed production are found everywhere in the East and West. ■

Discriminating planters demand American grown seeds; they have been too often deceived in the trash shipped from Europe. They know from experience that European seeds cannot be relied upon to be as good in quality or vitality as American; they know that they are ripened in a climate of much moisture, and consequently do not possess such powers of germination as ours, and they know that the American seed grower as a man is, in intelligence, observation and tact so far ahead of the peasant cultivators of Europe, as to leave no room for comparison as to the results of his labors.

The European, however, working at thirty to forty cents per day, produces seeds which in the eyes of some merchants have the merit of being cheap, and accordingly large quantities are brought to this country and sold by dealers who masquerade as American merchants. They always forget however, to tell their customers the origin of their stocks.

To a market gardener the quality of seeds he buys is of the utmost importance. The stock from which they are grown must be of acclimatized habit, must be judiciously selected of best individual types, thoroughly culled of all sports of root, leaf, or seed, properly harvested to insure the highest percentage of germination, and properly stored and labeled to guard against subsequent error in nomenclature. All these and others, are of vital necessity, as the trucker cannot afford to plant, manure, and cultivate crops which, if bad, only prove bad after months of patient labor and large expense.

Native American grown seeds unquestionably do best under our American sun - foreign stocks do not bear our tropical heat. Under these circumstances the most satisfactory way is to buy American grown seed, and to get it from the producer - those who can say themselves that they grow the stocks they have for sale.

Among the Philadelphia seed firms is one which stands out boldly as a producer of native seeds. Its reputation has been made upon American stock, and it continues still, as it has been for one hundred years, the largest producer on this continent. Such a reputation is to be envied - such a wide acknowledgement of merit is the outgrowth of practical business management, technical ability and honest dealing.