352 Slate IJorticuItiira! Socicfy. 



ticultural Socict_v, has Ijcen a great traveler. He went through Tash- 

 kent, in Central Asia, to find a species of alfalfa that would grow in the 

 cold northern states; went to Japan to study rice growing, and to the 

 far interior of China for the primitive peach. He spent ten months 

 there, ^T'lveling i,3oo miles in wagons and 700 miles in sledges. 



"I struck the Siberian railway at Omsk," he said, "and the Russian 

 peasant felt something like civilization. But people who talk about 

 enfranchising those peasants should see them and then they would modify 

 their views." 



Prof. Hansen's foreign travels were undertaken for the Department 

 of Agriculture. — K. C. Star. 



SATURDAY, .DECEMBER 30, 9 A. M. 



ORCHARDS. 



THE LH^^E HISTORIES OF SOME FUNGUS PESTS OF OR- 

 CHARD TREES. 



(Dr. T. J. BurriU, Urbana, 111.) 



It is very difficult for one who has never looked through a com- 

 pound microscope to understand what a parasite fungus is or how it 

 grows. No one could have had much of an idea about these things if 

 it had not been for this helpful instrument, for while in some cases these 

 fungi are evident, in some states, neither their structure nor the sepa- 

 rate vegetable parts, the active agents in the process of destruction, could 

 have been studied or known. In hundreds of other cases the entire 

 growth fails to reach sufficient size to be recognized by the unaided eye. 



Insect depredators can usually be seen, though here again the mag- 

 nifier is often called into requisition. It takes, for instance, exceedingly 

 sharp eyes to make out, imaided, the egg of a codlin moth of the minute 

 larva (worm) that develops therefrom and creeps by much smaller legs 

 over its perilous journey to the eye of a young apple, or by the much 

 smaller tools of its mouth, penetrates the resisting skin. But this egg 

 and even these legs and mouth parts, are coarse structures, compared 

 with many of the parts, essential to the life and work, of a parasitic 

 fungus. 



All ordinary plants are made up of cells as a wall is made up of 

 bricks, and while these cells vary much in size, an average cross diameter 



