278 STATE HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



In regard to ''incipient'' yellows, I must acknowledge that I cannot detect 

 it with any degree of certainty. Others are probably as helpless. I am sure 

 of my diagnosis only when I find the symptoms previously recorded as char- 

 acteristic of yellows, and then the disease is no longer "incipient," If we 

 are to discuss this subject intelligently, we must know beyond any question 

 that Tre have in mind the same malady. 



I have given more attention to the Goessman-Penhallow treatment than to 

 any other because it has been more prominently before the public, and be- 

 cawse it seemed to offer more reasonable hope of success than any other. 

 However there is no end to so-called remedies. If we may believe published 

 statements, peach yellows has been cured by stable manure, urine, house 

 slops, lime, gas lime, wood-aslies, potash, chlorate of potash, saltpeter, 

 ground bone, bone-black, hot lye, hot soap, hot water, fishbrine, fish com- 

 post, and various other commercial fertilizers, especially those compounded 

 of muriate of potash and dissolved bone-black, and sold under the name of 

 "Peach Tree Fertilizer," or "Peach Yellows Remedy." Some manufac- 

 turers have also advertised such fertilizers as possessing the property of 

 germicides. All such statements are false and misleading, and are not made 

 in the interest of peach growers. 



WET AND RICH SOILS. 



In some orchards which I have examined the disease was unquestionably 

 worse in bottoms and sags, which receive more or less drainage from other 

 parts of the field and are naturally richer and moister. as shown by the 

 appearance of the soil and by the larger growth of weeds and trees. It is 

 less apparent on Map VII, but this may be owing to the fact that on two 

 sides of that orchard in the near vicinity are older trees badly diseased for 

 some years, and from which this orchard may perhaps have been infected, if 

 it did not bring its infection from the nursery. However, the disease does 

 not always start in the lowest part of an orchard, and is by no means con- 

 fined to sags and bottoms, as the maps show clearly enough. Even in the 

 same orchard, where it affects bottoms, one may be taken and the other 

 spared. Orchard No. 12 of this report affords a striking illustration of this. 

 It contains two shallow sags of about the same area, and of the same general 

 character, as determined by soil, moisture, weeds, and the gro??th of trees. 

 If anything, the northwest sag is a little moister and less fertile. The same 

 weeds grow in both, but in 1888 the weeds were observed to be a little ranker 

 in the south sag. The northwest sag is planted with the Beers' Smock. 

 The south sag is planted with trees purchased for Salway, but which seemed 

 to me identical with Beers' Smock. The northwest sag contained no disease 

 trees in 1887 and only one appeared in 1888, that one being on the outer edge. 

 In the south sag, in 1887, which was the first year of attack, I found eleven 

 trees badly diseased by yellows, and eleven months later, when the orchard 

 was re-examined, I found ten additional cases in that sag and on the dry ground 

 immediately surrounding it. Most of the Crawfords which became diseased 

 in 1888 were also near this bottom. Had the diseased first appeared in the 

 northwest sag, I have no doubt the conditions in 1888 would have been reversed 

 (see the marked tendency toward grouping exhibited on the maps). The 

 general opinion among prominent peach growers, both on the Chesapeake 

 and Delaware peninsula and in Michigan, is that the disease is more likely to 



