Summer Meeting. 25 



liver could not live without the elephant, nor could there be a healthy, 

 live elephant without a liver. Horticulture could not be a successful 

 science without biology, nor could biology be a complete science without 

 comprehending horticulture. 



No purely physical labor, without wise mental guidance can ever 

 accomplish desirable results. The would-be fruit grower may thrust 

 the finest fruit trees into post Jioles dug in a swamp, or elsewhere, and 

 await patiently his income, .but his patience will be changed to impa- 

 tience, and his income transformed into disappointment and poverty. 



The would-be practical horticulturist (?) abounding in "horse sense," 

 but eschewing all 'book-farming" ideas, may successfully grow fine ' 

 fruit trees, say pears and apples. He suffers no anxiety about the few 

 scattering fire-blighted twigs and blossoms during 'the first few years 

 of fruiting. He begins to get faint vision-peeps at the shimmering heaps 

 of gold, glinting beyond the snowy blossoms and rich foliage of the first 

 "full-crop" year. Suddenly, after a few warm spring rains, nearly every 

 new-grown twig of blossoms and leaves blackens before the awful fire- 

 bUght, and in vain he drives his tree trunks full of nails, at the sug- 

 gestion of his neighbor's horse sense, thus postponing his hopes for the 

 gold heaps for another year. Another year the suffering tree trunks 

 may not grow a twig suft'iciently juicy for the bactrium of fire-blight. 



The practical horticulturist has probably found no disease of fruit 

 trees so thorouglily destructive as fire-blight, nor so completely baf- 

 fling to all attempts to find a satisfactory remedy. All spraying was 

 found a useless waste of money, time and energy. All cutting and 

 burning of blighted twigs was practically in vain so long as the or- 

 chardist remained in ignorance of the real biological nature of the cause 

 of the disease. Mr. M. B. Waite, of the Bureau of Vegetable Pathology 

 and Physiology, United States Department of Agriculture, in his study 

 of "The Cause and Prevention of Pear Blight," proposed, some years 

 ago (Year Book, United States Department of Agriculture, 1895) a 

 method of cure and prevention which is absolute, if followed out with 

 absolute thoroughness and completeness. In speaking of the method of 

 curing and preventing fire-blight Mr. Waite says : "In the process now 

 proposed, there are three vital points, namely, the thoroughness and 

 completeness with which the work is carried out, the time w^hen the cut- 

 ting should be done, and a thorough knowledge of the disease so as to 

 know hoiv to cut. The method of holding the blight in check was dis- 

 covered through a careful scientific investigation of the life history of 

 the microbe which causes it." Mr. Waite made this careful scientific 

 investigation- in the early nineties, though the microbe itself was dis- 

 covered in 1S79 by Prof. T. J. Burrill. Mr. Waite established the fol- 



