STATE AGRICULTURAL SOCIETY. 133 



virtually dead from the moment vegetation ceases. It is just 

 here that the injury of a long and warm autumn, suddenly fol- 

 lowed by winter, is felt. The hardiest fruit trees, but especially 

 the half-hardy, as the peach and the grape, are often thus fatally 

 injured. Even corn stalks cut up for fodder, late in autumn, are 

 saved with difficulty, chemical changes in their juices often 

 inducing sourness and decay before they can be cured. 



4. Tropical plants not susceptible of acclimation. — Few 

 topics, relating to agriculture, exhibit so much liability to erro- 

 neous opinion as this. 



1. It might have been observed that the cucumber, melon, 

 tomato, potato, Indian corn, &c., bear frost now no better than 

 they did when first introduced from the tropics, two or three 



centuries ago. 



2. So it might have been observed that now, just as formerl}^, 

 the occurrence of a cold and wet, unsteady season, injures or 

 ruins tropical foliage, fruits, seeds and roots. 



3. The climatic range of tropicals has not been materially 

 increased. Improvements in protections, aspects, sub-soiling, 

 &c., may now admit of the culture of tropicals in advanced posi- 

 tions nortliward. But the circumstances remaining unchanged, 

 the limits of the culture of corn, melons, cotton, grasses, cucum- 

 bers, &c., remain just at the limits designated centuries ago. 



4. The most that can be claimed is, that many tropicals, by 

 reproduction from the seed, may be shortened in season of growth, 

 as already explained above. Other varieties are capable of being 

 budded or grafted on some of the more hardy kindred varieties, 

 as the peach, apricot or tlie plum, thus shortening the period of 

 their growth. It is also perhaps true, conversely, that some hardy 

 trees, removed south and protected from the hot sun for a year 

 or two, are better able to bear the heat of that climate. It is 

 found here that trees are more safely brought from nurseries, at 

 the east and west, than from New-York city, or New Jersey, in 

 the autumn, the climatic intensity here being greater than in the 

 latter places. 



5. Many varieties of plants derive from the soil or atmosphere, 

 where they originate, some peculiar qualities, which cannot 

 be sustained in perfection when transmitted to other soils and 

 atmospheres, though in the same general climatic range. Thus 



