UNITED STATES. 107 
The trees were mostly tall, straight, and devoid of branches till towards 
their summits, the boles very clean, but of no great diameter. Apple 
orchards were common along the whole line of road, the trees healthy 
and well laden with fruit. Boys brought apples, pears, plums and 
peaches to the railway cars for sale; the first pretty good, the pears 
generally hard and indifferent, (the American climate does not seem 
favourable to this fruit, still less so to the apricot, which is rarely seen 
anywhere,) the plums (of a yellow kind) tolerable, the peaches of 
medium quality or variable, as I found them farther south, sometimes 
pretty soft and juicy, but often hard and juiceless. The apple and 
the peach may be considered as the two most valuable of Pomona's 
gifts in America, which, from some defect of elimate, or from the 
number of insects injurious to the trees, is inferior to Europe in the 
variety and excellence of its fruits. The apple thrives admirably in 
the central and northern states, and as far as Montreal, in Canada, 
splendid orchards of this fruit are to be seen. The peach is abundantly 
grown throughout the Union, but being mostly, if not always, raised 
from the stone, many worthless varieties are produced, and the better 
kinds are transient, or no trouble is taken to perpetuate good sorts by 
grafting, which indeed would not repay the labour of doing from the 
short-lived nature of the tree in this climate, which comes into bearin 
in three or four years from the kernel, and does not last above eight or 
ten before requiring to be renewed. The peaches of New Jersey are 
esteemed for their excellence, but to the northward of that state the 
summers are too short and cool for the perfect maturing of the fruit, 
and the trees themselves are apt to be injured by the rigour of winter. 
The most northern station at which I remarked the peach as a stan- 
dard, small, indeed, but apparently healthy, was at Burlington in 
Vermont (lat. 44°27’), but the vicinity of Lake Champlain, on whose 
shores the town is situated, has a mitigating effect on the otherwise 
severe climate of that part of the Union, for at Montreal, just one 
degree due north of Burlington, the peach has disappeared from the 
orehards and sought the shelter of the garden wall, being unable to 
resist the winter any longer as a standard fruit-tree 
` I shall have occasion to speak of the other (ipit cultivated in Ame- 
rica in a subsequent part of this journal. Datura stramonium and its 
variety D. tatula seemed to have wholly disappeared, or to have become 
extremely scarce, since leaving New York, as I hardly remarked it on 
any part of the line of road betwixt Troy and Buffalo, or on the waste 
P2 
