Troflt of Cfteri\y Culfure. 87 



Influence of Trees upon Kainfall. 



A CORRESPONDENT of the Popular Scie?ice Monthly, gives a strong illustra- 

 tion in proof of the influence of trees upon rainfall. A friend of the writer 

 who spent the months of February, March, and April last on the Island of Santa 

 Cruz, West Indies, says : — " When there twenty years ago, the island was a garden 

 of freshness, beauty, and fertility — woods covered the hills, trees were everywhere 

 abundant, and rains were profuse and frequent. The memory of its loveliness called 

 him there at the beginning of the past year, when, to his astonishment, he found 

 about one-third of the island — which is about 25 miles long — an utter desert. The 

 forests and trees generally had been cut away, rainfalls had ceased, and a pro- 

 cess of dessication beginning at one end of the land had advanced gradually and 

 irresistibly upon the Island, until for seven miles it is dried and desolate as the sea 

 shore. Houses and beautiful plantations have been abandoned, and the people 

 watch the advance of desolation, unable to arrest it, but knowing almost to a 

 certainty the time when their own habitations, their gardens and fresh fields, will 

 become a part of the waste. The whole island seems doomed to become a desert. 

 The inhabitants believe, and my friend confirms their opinion, that this sad result is 

 due to the destruction of the trees upon the island some years ago." 



Influence of Stocks. 



A CORRESPONDENT of Colman's Rural World, from long experience, feels 

 convinced that fruit grafted on seedling stocks will partake more or less of the 

 nature of such stocks, and in support of this theory, says : — " I once grafted an 

 English wild cherry on a wild cherry stock. When it came into bearing, it bore 

 cherries about two-thirds the size of the English cherry, the color of the fruit red, 

 and the flavor near that of the wild cherry, viz. : bitter. Another time I took cions 

 of an early May cherry, and grafted part of them on Mazzard stocks and part on 

 Morello stocks. When the trees came into bearing, the fruit was so different that 

 each kind might have been called a different variety from the other. 



Any fruit grower can convince himself of the truth of this matter if he will take 

 cions from one apple tree and graft them into twenty different young trees in his 

 orchard. When they come into bearing he will probably find that the fruit of any 

 two will not be exactly alike. In my own neighborhood I know many apple trees 

 of our old standard varieties, the fruit of which has become so degenerated, that they 

 can hardly now be identified even by the best judges of fruit." 



Profit of Cherry Culture. — A California paper says : Some of the cherry 

 trees of Mr. Bidwell's orchard, in Butte county, yielded §200 to the tree this season, 

 the fruit selling as high as sixty cents per pound in San Francisco. 



