45 
and matured three plums. I was very greatly surprised this same sea- 
son, in July, to find near this graft, and in the same tree, about twenty- 
five perfectly matured Wild Goose plums, all very close to the Rolling 
Stone graft and none any distance from it, and the Wild Goose did not 
ripen prematurely or fall off before fully developed. The three plums 
matured by the graft ripening about a month later. 
Three of the Rolling Stone grafts grew finely the first summer after 
grafting, and the next spring bloomed profusely. The tree in which 
they were grafted grew at the south end of a row of the same variety 
(Wild Goose) about 30 rods long. This second season after the gratts 
were inserted the tree in which they were growing matured a full crop 
of fruit; the one next north 4 feet from it was full of fruit on its south 
side; the fruit was scattering. The next tree 10 feet north of the grafts 
matured three plums; not one other tree in the row out of perhaps a 
hundred matured a plum that season. 
The extreme cold of the following winter destroyed the Wild Goose 
below the grafts, and the following spring they did not bloom. Twenty 
feet east of this row of Wild Goose stood a row of cross-bred seedlings. 
The following summer (of 1885) this row of seedlings bloomed and 
fruited enormously, and the row of Wild Goose fruited very heavily on 
the east side of the trees, with scarcely a plum on the west side of the 
row. 
And to close the record of these two rows, I will add that during the 
spring of 1886 I made a record of the time of blooming of all the 
plum trees on the place, and of the force and direction of the wind 
during the time of blooming, and find, by referring to that record, 
that a gentle east wind prevailed for three days during the time when 
the row of native plums were in the height of bloom, and the row of 
Wild Goose matured an enormous crop of very fine fruit, but with very 
much more fruit on the east than on the west side (the row of seedlings 
furnishing the pollen which was wafted to them by the east wind.) 
The first year that the Rolling Stone grafts bloomed gave me the long- 
hidden secret of the failure in productiveness of the native plums, 
which has proved itself to be that a great majority, or nearly all 
of them, are not fertile with their own pollen; or, in other words, 
from some not as yet fully explained cause or causes the pollen of, say, 
the Wild Goose or Miner will not pollenize the ovaries of their own 
flowers. Why it will not does not become material; the fact remains, 
nevertheless. 
After a pretty thorough investigation my conclusion as to the reason 
is, that the pollen matures and is flown away and wasted before the 
stigmas are mature enough to receive it; or, it may be true that the 
pollen of some varieties is impotent to their own stigmas, or possibly 
even poisonous to them. That this latter condition of facts may exist 
has been fully and satisfactorily proven by the most carefully conducted 
experiments by the great Darwin, and the results given in detail in his 
