BLIGHT, ETC. 401 



Mr. F. "W. Kimball: We would like to hear from Mr. Philips on 

 tree blight. 



Mr. Philips, (Wisconsin): Mr. Chairman, I have heard the drift of 

 your discussion but very little, and I know very little about blight. 

 I believe Mr. Harris comes as near striking the key note in regard to 

 preventing blight as anything I have yet heard. I believe just as 

 he does. I believe the more vigor we have in a tree the less blight 

 we will have, and in pruning a tree we should aim to have as vigor- 

 ous a tree as possible. I did some irrigating this year, and the 

 editor of the "Madison Democrat" gave me his experience j^esterday. 

 The more vigor and the more water, the better the tree will be and 

 the less tendency it will have to drop fruit. I do not think there is 

 any preventative of blight more than to give your trees the best 

 care you can. Whenever I find a tree on which the blight appears, 

 it has got to leave the orchard. I believe it is contagious. In re- 

 gard to the location of an orchard — I will say right here I have some 

 specimens of apples here that were grown on their own roots, not 

 on top-worked stock. There are too many to talk about. The Trans- 

 cendent I do not call a vigorous grower. I top-worked on the 

 Transcendent, and the other will grow twice as much top. I do not 

 call the Transcendent a vigorous apple. 



Mr. E. H. S. Dartt: It seems a little singular how much doctors 

 disagree. (Laughter). I have always thought — and I have not 

 changed my mind — that the higher we go with our orchards the 

 more likely we would be to get blight. Of course, vigorous trees 

 are good things to have, and some of them do not blight, and some 

 of them do blight. I think the gentleman was right when he said, 

 discard the blighting kinds. Some of them will blight, and some of 

 them will not blight to do any harm, so throw out the blighters. 



Mr. Dunlap, Ills.: I was just going to remark that this matter of 

 blighting is a never ending source of argument, but my observation 

 in this matter is this, that blight is always attended by some atmos- 

 pherical conditions, and when we do not have the blight when those 

 conditions exist, it may depend on other circumstances; and I agree 

 with the last gentleman who spoke, it is almost impossible to pre- 

 vent blight. We have come to the conclusion so far as pears are 

 concerned, that pears that are not over-stimulated in cultivation are 

 not subject to blight, and yet we have come to the conclusion this 

 past year that we are not so certain about it as we were, and we 

 have come to believe that when certain atmospherical conditions 

 exist— and I might mention that by this I mean, for instance, a 

 heavy rain in summer and then intense heat following— it will have 

 a tendency to produce blight. I call attention to thin, as we had 

 those heavy rains last spring followed by extremely warm days, and 

 I think that was the cause of the tendency to blight. Prof. Bunnell, 

 of the State University of Illinois, is, perhaps, the man who discov- 

 ered the true origin of blight, that it is a bacteria, and when the 

 conditions are right for the propagation of those bacteria we have 

 blight. The Yellow Transparent you have here, we would find a 

 very unprofitable variety in Illinois, for we would fear blight, and 

 it seems to be much more subject to that than the Duchess. I can- 



