46 TRANSACTIONS OF THE ILLINOIS 



it was so, and when I saw the broken rotten lhnb, " I felt in my bones," that I had dis- 

 covered the true cause of the rotting of the fruit, which I had been seeking in vain for 

 years — and for myself, I shall hereafter class all rotten winter apple trees with frosted 

 Catawba grape vines. You cannot sell them to me ; I have no use for them ; they do 

 not fill the bill. I should have remarked that the outside of this Baldwin tree was per- 

 fectly thrifty, healthful and vigorous. Its only fault was its constant tendency to sucker 

 in the top, and throw up water sprouts ; which I attributed to its excessive vigor ; but 

 it was a mere shell — a whited sepulchre — not full of dead mens' bones, but of living 

 toadstools. I have also several pear trees with known rotten and hollow trunks, that 

 will not let their fruit last long enough to fall to the ground without rotting, in seasons 

 prone to blights. Though most of the trees of this description, died of the blight long 

 ago, and those still living seem pre-disposed to its attacks, and will probably soon go in 

 the same way. 



I have thus intimated some few of the general reasons that I have for believing that 

 the proper and natural nidus of those fungi that cause the grape and pear blight, dis- 

 tinctly so called, is the rotten or dead and decaying fibers, and the obstructed and soured 

 sap of the trees themselves ; while they can and do find a nidus also in other decaying 

 vegetable matter near by. 



For instance, the only Clinton grape vine on my place, that I have ever known to rot 

 in twenty years, hangs over an old rotten cherry tree stump and along the eaves of a 

 rotting shed ; this vine never rotted its fruit till this nidus was made, and now it grows 

 worse and worse from year to year ; it even rotted this last year when the Catawbas 

 escaped. The vine itself was also reset, when an old vine, and doubtless has more or 

 less rotten wood from mutilation, in its roots. I have strong suspicions also, that it will 

 be found out at last ; that there are species of insects, similar to the Aphis that prey on 

 the roots of the apple trees, which feed on the roots of old grape vines and pear trees, 

 especially on heavy soils filling them full of dead particles of bark and wood, and furnish- 

 ing a proper nidus underground for those destructive Cryptograms. 



Hence, the great possible utility of ashes, alkalies, copperas, blacksmith's cinders, gas- 

 lime and especially carbolic acid, or whatever else will destroy these pests ; independ- 

 ently of their power to enrich the soil, and increase the growth of the tree and fruit. In 

 some instances I have found the ravages of these pests in the roots, and if ever I see 

 them again I will tell Dr. Walsh of them. 



I present the above thoughts only as suggestions, and not as established scientific con- 

 clusions. For when we come within the domains of that wonderful microscopic world, 

 where whole forest trees grow and scatter their fruit abroad — and whole herds and 

 troops of living animals, range, breed, fatten and die, on the little end of nothing whit- 

 tled off to a sharp point ; our own natural organs are so coarse and clumsy and inapt, 

 that we can make haste but slowly, and often find more in our philosophy than we had 

 before dreamed of. But at a time when fever and ague, and all other modes of similar 

 diseases in men ; and the Texan fever in cattle, is suspected, if not demonstrated, to be 

 the product of these same vegetable fungi ; when many diseases in animals as well as 

 consumption and multitudes of skin or surface diseases in men are attributed to micro- 

 scopic animals, with more or less certainty of knowledge, it would seem not so unreason- 

 able to be looking in the same direction, for the causes of many of our worst forms of 

 disease in vegetable life. For if a Texan steer, or a man with the fever and ague, shakes 

 and shivers in the wind, only because he has become a walking forest ; or if a consump- 



