the last few years, are far more delicate and liable to disease than native sorts of 

 equal merit, raised from seed in this country ? 



I throw out these queries to set some of your ingenious and practical corre- 

 spondents, in various parts of the country, at work to furnish materials for answers 

 that will settle some knotty points. For my own part, I have made up my mind 

 that, to grow fine pears for profit, we must, in order to save the trees and keep 

 them sound, keep the trunks and leading branches covered with a light sheathing of 

 straw all the year round. This guards the bark of the principal parts of the tree 

 from all excesses of heat and cold. I have experimented for four years past with 

 this plan of sheathing, and can say that I am quite satisfied with it. Among three 

 dozen pear-trees now just come into bearing, one-third of them have been kept 

 in straw, and not a single one of that dozen has suffered by blight or other dis- 

 ease ; while, of the remaining two dozen, nearly one-half have dropped off, and 

 been dug and consigned to the brush heap. Some careless farmer or gardener — 

 fond of shirking everything that he can — will say : " But who can take the trouble 

 to straw all his pear-trees ?" 



You can, is my reply. Try it on half a dozen trees, and keep an account of 

 the time and labor spent in it. It will amount to a few cents per tree — not the 

 price of half a peck of Yirgalieus in the York market. And if you can gather 

 pears by the cart-load — for no fruit ripens better, or has a higher flavor, than the 

 pear, in this climate — if, I say, you can gather pears every year by the cart-load 

 for only the trouble of strawing the trees, then the blight take you if you are too 

 lazy to do it ! An Old Digger. 



FROST, AND THE CUNILA MARIANA (Z.), OR DITTANY. 



BY J. STAUFFER, MOUNT JOY, PENN'A. 



The common Dittany, a perennial of the Mint family, with small, purplish 

 flowers, in corymbed cymes or clusters, growing on dry hills from New York to 

 Kentucky, is too well known to require any further description. 



In August, we frequently observe a capsular body amid the ordinary fructifica- 

 tion and flowers of this plant, which was first pointed out to me by Prof. S. S. 

 Haldiman, desiring me to pay attention, and try to discover what insect produces 

 the excrescence. Notwithstanding my desire so to do, I have not succeeded. 



December 6, 1856, happening to pass through a wood of chestnut sprouts 

 interspersed with the red cedar, near the Willistown Baptist Meeting-IIouse, in 

 Chester County, I observed the dry remains of stems, foliage, and fruit, of quite 

 a number of plants of this species, with the expectation of finding, at this late 

 season, the empty cells or larvte of the insect. I made diligent search, but could 

 find no trace of such a pod-like excrescence. What, however, amply recompensed 

 me for the attention bestowed, was the discovery that this plant is peculiar, and 

 is truly k frost plant, far exceeding the Helianthemum Canadense, or Frost-Weed, 

 as it is popularly called, from the fact that, late in autumn, crystals of ice shoot 

 from the cracked bark at the root. 



Our Cunila has attached to the stem a shell-work of ice, of a pearly whiteness, 

 beautifully striated, sometimes, like a series of shells one in another — at others, 

 curved round on either side of the stem like an open, polished, bi-valve ; then, 

 in others, again, curled over in every variety of form, like the petals of a tulip. 

 Though one o'clock P. M., and the sun shining brightly, I carefully took up several 

 specimens, and conveyed them three hundred yards, to the dwelling of Mr. Griffith 

 and exhibited the frost flowers to the family. No other herb or grass had 



Vol. YII._Feb. 1857. 



