396 ANNUAL EEPOKT 



to a man. When a magnet is subjected to a white heat it loses 

 its polarity and can never be restored. Eight here is a matter 

 upon which our more learned professors should enlighten us — 

 how and to what extent electric forces apply to plants, and what 

 environing conditions will injure or destroy their circulatory 

 polarities. 



A critical j^eriod is when the sap goes up from the spangcoles 

 for the development of buds and leaves. These not being un- 

 folded enough to educe a balancing exhalation, an excessive 

 solar heat in a dry atmosphere may dam up the flow, overcharg- 

 ing the variform tissue, or circulatory ducts, resulting in a 

 greater ruin than that from the combined forces of an Arctic 



winter. 



Last spring I had occasion to remove some seedling apple 

 trees. To all appearance they were generally in excellent 

 condition, root and branch. In a few days the buds swelled into 

 incipient leaves, and the same promising feature characterized 

 the older trees of the permanent orchard. Of a sudden the heat 

 of a midsummer burst upon us, growing hotter week in and 

 week out. Ere the temperature lowered I noticed signs of wilt- 

 ing; the tender leaves dried up, and soon three-quarters of the 

 old and the new orchard was dead. I detected a sour efflvivia in 

 all the dead candidates, indicating that the starch or sacharine 

 properties of the sap fermented in the hot circulation. The few 

 that survived the shock were more or less discolored, "black- 

 hearted," traceable, no doubt, to the same cause. During the 

 prior winter another killing force fell upon the jjlauts in our 

 section. We had no rains to any marked extent from August 

 to March; now and then a shower of snow, soon melting away. 

 The soil was so dry it could not freeze for many weeks, even in 

 December and January. Of course thousands upon thousands 

 of young plants winter-dried up — effect the same as in a sum- 

 mer drought. My first impression was that my apple trees were 

 thus imperceptibly injured, the same as a field of one-year box 

 elders, and probably they were thus weakened, there not being 

 enough of the nutritive salts derived from water held back in 

 the roots for the summer's vegetation. But on closer inspection 

 I had to rank the winter calamity as secondary and not primal, 

 for strawberry, blackberry and other small fruit plants, shipped 

 in a perfect state of health, wilted and died in about the same 

 percentage as the apple trees; after having developed their buds, 

 looking green and promising, they were paralyzed by that 



