388 MR PELL S EXPERIMENTS. 



advantage of the facilities it would afford for giving and 

 acquiring practical information, how justly they spoke 

 of the greatness and liberality of the idea, and how 

 patriotically desirous they were that their own country 

 should be well represented in the assembly of the nations. 

 Among others, I had the pleasure of making the 

 acquaintance of Mr Pell, whose name I have already 

 mentioned. This gentleman is known to fruit-growers 

 as the owner of a famous orchard at Pelham farm, on 

 the river Hudson, containing 20,000 apple-trees, chiefly 

 of that highly prized Newton pippin, for which London 

 alone affords an almost insatiable market. 



I was much interested with the history which Mr 

 Pell gave me of the chemico-physiological experiments 

 he had for some years been making in his orchard, tak 

 ing hundreds of trees at a time upon which to try a 

 single experiment. One of these trials, as I have ex 

 plained in the preceding volume, (Chapter VI.,) had 

 been to ascertain if it was not possible to compel apple- 

 trees to produce a good crop of fruit every year, instead 

 of once in two years only, as is usually the case in 

 Europe as well as in America. He found that by 

 cleaning off the rough bark, pruning carefully, slitting 

 the bark as high as the first branches, and digging-m 

 lime around the roots in the autumn, he had a heavy 

 crop the succeeding summer. By digging-in, the second 

 autumn, stable manure around them, he had an equally 

 heavy crop the second summer. The general result of 

 his trials is, that a crop may, by such treatment, be 

 secured every year ; but he thinks the tree would not 

 live so long a life. Still, if the flavour of the fruit be as 

 good, and the expense of tending not too great, it would 

 be easy to have a second set of trees coming forward, 

 while the first grows old, as is the case in the peach 

 orchards of New Jersey. There would be less cost 

 in this also if Mr Pell s mode of procedure were adopted. 



