71$ 



Passing into the domain of horticulture, the view is stril more start- 

 ling. Our standard fruit, the apple, we still raise cheaj)!}', and can rely 

 with tolerable certainty upon a crop every second year, but wo cannot 

 shut our eyes to the fact that the ravages of insects upon this fniit are 

 growing worse and worse every year. The mischievous boy will hesi- 

 tate now in gratifying his appetite with stolen fruit of nights, for though 

 he may know the locality of the trees, and supply himself with deli- 

 cious pippins and rambos, he cannot tell unless ho has day light to aid 

 him, whether it is pure apple he is eating, or with the melting fruit he 

 is crushing the writhing worm between his teeth ; and the lovers of 

 good old cider, or the sweet beverage fresh from the mill, would hardly 

 like, as they smack their lips over their accustomed drinks, to enter into 

 careful calculations as to the proportionate amount of vegetable and ani- 

 mal of which it was composed. 



Latterly, too, a worm attacks our old apple trees at Iheir roots, and 

 completely destroys them by girdling them just below the surface of 

 the earth before we are aware of their attack. Several times, lately, I 

 have been called to part with a cherished old friend destroyed in thk 

 manner — a valuable fall pippin, or a Spitzenberg that yearly bad beon 

 accustomed to shower his abundant crop of blushing fruit into my bas- 

 kets. Before we are aware of their danger, the fruit begins to wither, 

 the leaves prematurely turn yellow — we hasten to ap[)ly the remedy, 

 but the mischief is already done, and we must wait patiently for another 

 to grow up to supply its place. 



The peach, too, is subject to the ravages of insects, and that to a de- 

 gree much greater than the apple. The attacks of the borer, however, 

 closely watched and frequently checked, will terminate its existence in 

 a few years, at the farthest. And within a year or two a smiill brown 

 beetle has made himself troublesome by selecting the largest and ripest 

 specimens, eating his way into them, and seeming to poison tlie whole 

 peach, which decays around him with great rapidity, and falL a tjight- 

 less mass to the earth. 



But a disease also attacks this tree to which, as yet, we are here total 

 strangers, but whose unwelcome visits we have every year reason to ex- 

 pect I mean the yellows — a sort of vegetable scrofula, which sweeps 

 away whole orchards, and transmits itself in the graft or in the pit to 

 succeeding generations. The disease probibly affects even 0x9 frnit, for 



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