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APPENDIX. 



REMARKS ON THE DURATION OF VARIETIES OF FRUIT TREES. 



IT was, for a long time, the popular notion that when a good 

 variety of fruit was once originated from seed, it might be con- 

 tinued by grafting and budding, for ever, or, at least, as some 

 old parchment deeds pithily gave tenure of land " as long as 

 grass grows, and water runs." 



About fourteen years ago, however, Thomas Andrew 

 Knight, the distinguished President of the Horticultural Society 

 of London, published an Essay in its Transactions, tending 

 entirely to overthrow this opinion, and to establish the doctrine 

 that all varieties are of very limited duration. 



The theory advanced by Mr. Knight is as follows: All the 

 constitutional vigor or properties possessed by any variety of 

 fruit are shared at the same time by all the plants that can 

 be made from the buds of that variety, whether by grafting, 

 budding, or other modes of propagating. In simpler terms, all 

 the plants or trees of any particular kind of pear or apple 

 being only parts of one original tree, itself of limited duration, 

 it follows, as the parent tree dies, all the others must soon after 

 die also. " No trees, of any variety," to use his own words, " can 

 be made to produce blossom or fruit till the original tree of that 

 variety has attained the age of puberty ;* and, under ordinary 

 modes of propagation, by grafts and buds, all become subject, 

 at no very distant period, to the debilities and diseases of old 

 age." 



It is remarkable that such a theory as this should have 

 been offered by Mr. Knight, to whose careful investigations the 

 science of modern horticulture is so deeply indebted as, 

 however common it is to see the apparent local decline of certain 

 sorts of fruit, yet it is a familiar fact that many sorts have also 

 been continued a far greater length of time than the life of any 



* This part of the doctrine has of late been most distinctly refuted, and 

 any one may repeat the experiment. Seedling fruit trees, it is well-known, 

 are usually several years before they produce fruit. But if a graft is in- 

 serted on a bearing tree, and after it makes one season fair growth, the 

 grafted shoot is bent directly down and tied there, with its point to the 

 stock below, it will, the next season the sap being checked produc* 

 flower-buds> and begin to bear, long before the parent tree. 



