250 FLORIDA FRUITS CHINESE SAND PEARS. 



CHAPTER XXV. 



CHINESE SAND PEARS. 



All over the North, wherever pears are grown, there 

 has of late years prevailed a dire disease, mysterious in its 

 cause, mysterious as to its remedies, and plain and certain 

 only in one respect, that of the destruction of pear grow- 

 ing as a profitable market fruit. Whole orchards of thou- 

 sands and tens of thousands of trees have gone down be- 

 fore the dread disease, and their owners have abandoned 

 the pear-growing business in despair. 



For years it seemed as if this delicious fruit must be 

 numbered among the things of the past, but for the ad- 

 vent of that for which our horticulturists had been largely 

 hoping, an entire new race of pears, with all the health 

 and vigor of the wonderful pears of China, and free from 

 the dreaded "blight" and all other diseases so destructive 

 to those which may now be termed our native varieties. 



In China the pear trees reckon their lives by as many 

 centuries as ours by decades, and are never attacked by 

 disease. This sturdy race of pears has been acclimated in 

 the United States by half a century of trial, and in all 

 that time not a single Chinese pear has been touched by 

 blight or any other disease. 



Happily, it has also been shown that these pears, unlike 

 the majority of the more familiar sorts, are especially 

 adapted to the Southern States, particularly to Georgia 

 and Florida. 



As yet there are not many varieties of these pears, all 

 of the sand pears now on the market having sprung from 

 the original Le Conte, but this is a fault that will soon be 

 mended, for all over the land enterprising horticulturists 



