42 PEEPAKATION OF THE SOIL. 



Mr. Do^vning certainly made a great mistake when, 

 in writing a description of the soils suitable for the 

 Pear, he pronounced a sandy loam unfitted for the 

 permanent growth of the tree. Two or three hours' 

 ride through the western end of Long Island would 

 have convinced him that there were, in that locality, 

 more pear trees, from fifty to one hundred years old, 

 than in all the rest of the United States. The number 

 of pear trees, more than forty years old, in Ejng's and 

 Queen's counties alone, must be greater than fifty 

 thousand. At Greenpoint, L. I., now the Seventeenth 

 Ward of Brooklyn, may be seen an orchard of more 

 than one hundred pear trees, which the oldest resi- 

 dents remember to have been of full size, and in full 

 bearing, in their boyhood. Three of these trees I have 

 found to measure respectively nine feet, ten and one- 

 half, and eleven feet in circumference. These last 

 cannot have been in existence less than one hundi-ed 

 and fifty years. 



Tliese were the offspring of seed planted by the 

 Dutch and Huguenot exiles, about the time of the 

 settlement of the town in 1648 ; and are certainly good 

 evidence of the longevity of the Pear, on compara- 

 tively light soils. I do not assert, however, that trees 

 planted on thin, sandy soils, especially such as overlie 

 an impervious, or a poisonous subsoil,"^ would not be 

 liable to blight. On such soils, the roots, compelled 

 to keep near the surface, are exposed to the sudden 

 and extreme heats of summer, by which their sap is 

 60 highly heated as to destroy the more newly-formed 



* As is the case, to a limited extent, in some districts of New Jersey, where the 

 inotoxide of iron — so injurious to vegetation— prevails. 



