292 



Nr^W ENGLAND FARMER. 



[A pril 7, 



From the Essex Register. 



HOPxTlGULTURE. 

 Belifivino; that Mr Knight's hypothesis to ac- 

 cniinl for the disease. I state ofseveial species of 

 the appio tree in Enghind, is not well foiirnleil 

 in (act, we stated a few months au;o, some ot'oiir 

 reasons, tor dissenting from Mr Knii^ht. Since) 

 that time, the siihject h'.is been taiien np by a 

 gentleman, to whose opinions the public are ac- j 

 ciiatnmeil to pay great deference ; and as lie has ^ 

 thought proper to avow his l)elief in Mr Knight':* 

 hypothesis, and to declare that we have mis- j 

 Uniierslnnd that hypolhesis, it becomes us to siiow 

 more lully the tacts and reasonings which have i 

 led us to believe, that Mr Knight is entirely mis- '• 

 taken in assigning as a cause i'or the apparent de- 

 cay of the Golden Pippin and Slyre Apple trees, 

 his liypothesis of the limited duration of parlicu- 1 

 lar species of plants, propagated by cuttings and j 

 grails. It is a subject in itself interesting, not 

 to the tarmer only, but to those who by their 

 writings and publications ore led to treat on this 

 subject. If erroneous notions are propagated 

 by l)ook3 of science, and by gentlemen whose 

 influence upon opinioii is great, it cannot tail, 

 sooner or Liter, to pioduce many evil conse- 

 quences upon the practical part of our agricul- 

 tural brethren. Knight's hypothesis !ias alieady 

 caused much unnecessary anxiety among nurse- 

 rymen, and (ilanters of orchards; and when we 

 iind a practical man, ITke Jlr Coxe, lielievinfr in 

 the hypothesis, and sullering himself to be in- 

 fluenced in his planting, and feeling; an indif- 

 ference to the old and favorite varieties of the 

 apple, wc see at once wliat effects it is likely 

 to produce upon the great multitude of orchard- j 

 ists throughout the country. And w-iien we see 

 such men as Mr Coxe and Mr Thacher,in their 

 writings, asserting and illustrating the hypoihe- 1 

 sis of Mr Knight, without adducing any proof! 

 whatever for its support, we cannot hut think! 

 it is high time to call Mr Knight's notions in i 

 (jueslion, and put the advocates of them upon i 

 their proof. As it stands now it is a mere gia- j 

 luitous assumption oil the part of Mr Knight, 

 as we intend to show In IhiscominuiiicAtion; and 

 we intend further to show, I hat it is a mere freak 

 of the imagination, utterly destitute of any found- 

 ation whatever. It is not denied that new va- 

 rieties of the apple and pear may be obtained 

 equally as good as 'the old, or even better; but 

 we beg leave to speak a little on Lehalf of the 

 preservation of the old varieties of apjiroveil | 

 excellence. We should be sorry to see the 

 Ribsloiie Pippin, the Styre, the Roxbury Russet, 

 the Royal Russet, the Si. Michael's Pear, he. 

 aliandoned under an impression that they had 

 " run out," or come to the termination of their 

 existence, by the decay or end of the duration 

 of the original parent stock. We should be sorry 

 to see wlial we deem an erroneous notion, inllu- 

 encing the mind of the American orchardisi, so 

 as to cause the neglect ol'the«e varieties of fruits 

 because they happened, from an unfavorable 

 succession of seasons, an improper soil, or bad 

 culture, to discover symptoms of an unhealthy 

 slate. At any ri'e, we will give our reasons 

 for disbelieving Knight's hypolhesin, and if they 

 should fail 10 convince others, or prove to be 

 fallacious, we siiall upon being made sensible of 

 it, acknowltfilge our error, and will take the 

 first opfioi iNiiiiy of relracling it. 



Bttl before we proceed to overlbrow Mr. 



Knight's hypothesis we must first shew, what 

 the hypothesis is. We do this the more readi- 

 ly', because the writer in the New England Far- 

 mer, (the Hon. Timothy Pickering) has said 

 we have not I'airly slated the hypolhesi?, in 

 making use of the vvoril "'sympathy," to express 

 l!ie dependence of the life ol' the grafts upon 

 the parent stock. 



We will not lake pains to enquire, who first 

 :^tarted the idea of the decay of the varieties of 

 the apple and pear; it is sullicient tor our pur- 

 pose, that Thomas Andrevv Knight, E^q. the 

 President of the Horticultural Society of Lon- 

 don, has been the most influential in prop.igat- 

 ing it, and from his ch.iracter lor science and 

 practical experience in the art of gardening, he 

 has had more efliciency in spreading the notion 

 than any other man. Mr Knight may be con- 

 sidered as the falher of the hypothesis, and to 

 him we shall apply for its developement and for 

 its proof. 



Mr Knight, in his Pomona Herefordiensis, 

 sav=, that •• those apples which have been long] 

 cullivaled are on the decay. The red streak^ 

 and the Gulden pi/jpin can no longer be pro|ia- j 

 gated with advantage. The fjiiit like the par- \ 

 cut tree, is alFected by the debilitated old age ol 

 the variety." Again,, in his treatise on the cul- 

 ture of the apple aii'l pear, page 6, " the moil, 

 and its successful rival the red sireak, with the 

 must and gnlden pippin, are in the last stages ol' 

 decay, and the St^p-c and Foxwhclp are hasten- 

 ing rapidly alter them.'' In Mr Knight's " in- 

 troductory remarks," relative to the objects 

 which the Horticultural Society of London have 

 in view, read April 'id, 1805, we observe in a 

 note, the Ibllowing, in support of his favourite 

 hypothesis ; '• I'be diseased slate of young graft- 

 ed trees of the golden pippin, and Ihe debase- 

 ment of fruit, alford one among a I'lousand in- 

 stitnces which might be aildiiced, of Ihe decay of 

 those varieties of fruit which have been long 

 propagated by grafting." 



We shall now adduce several of the com- 

 mentators on Mr Knight's hypothesis, to show 

 precisely v/liat they understood by it. We 

 quote the following from Mr Thacher, on the 

 culture and management of the apple tree. — 

 " Some years ago, from due investigation and 

 thorough conviction, Blr. liuckniit |)ro|)agated 

 the princi[)le, that all the grafts, taken from 

 the first tree or parent slock, or any ot the cfe- 

 sceiidants, will (or some generations thrive; but 

 when this first slock shall, by mere dint of old 

 age, fall into actual decay, or nihilily of vegeta- 

 tion., the descendants, however young, or in 

 whatever situation they may be, will grailually 

 decline; and from that time, it would be imjiru 

 dent, in point of profit, to attempt propagaling 

 from that variety, or any of them." Further — 

 "although these trees may amount to millions, 

 yet on the death of the promogeneous or parent 

 stock, merely from old age, or nihilily of growth, 

 each individual shall decline, in '.whatever coimtnj 

 ihey may he, or however endued with ^o»r/i 

 unit heallk^'' " To exemplify this (loint, let it 

 be supposed that the Baldwin ajiplo is a new 

 variety, [)roduced from the seed. This as the 

 original -lock may continue to live one hundred 

 yejrs. A scion taken from it when ten years 

 old may live ninety years; another taken ten 

 years after, may enjoy a duration of eighty 

 years ; and so successively, at the expiration of 



one hundred years, the original stock, and all 

 the derivatives iVom it, will become extinct." 



This developement is enough, one would 

 think, to cast some doubt upon the hypothesis 

 of Mr. Knight. It is precisely the same as 

 to say, of a family consisting of a grundmolher, 

 children, grand children, and great grand child- 

 ren, that all their lives depend upon that of the 

 grandmother; and that, when her term ol" life 

 was completed, all her progeny would die at 

 the same time. If the grandmother died at one 

 hundred years of age, and her great grand child 

 was a tine healthy boy of ten years of age, yet 

 his youth, and strength and vigor would avail 

 him nothing, for his existence was no new sys- 

 tem of" being, but only a continuance of the sys- 

 tem of being of the grandmother, and that the 

 duration of the lease of the life of the child de- 

 pended upon the termination of the lease of the 

 life of the grandmother. 



The other commentator upon the theory of 

 .Mr Knishi, which we shall notice, is the cele- 

 brated Robert Southey, poet Laureate. In his 

 •• Espriella's Letters," he remarks upon th? 

 Teignton squash pear— " All the trees have 

 bsen grafted from the same original stock at 

 Teignton; these stocks are now in the last stage 

 of decay, and all their grafts are decaying at the 

 same time. They who have made the physiol- 

 ogy of plants their study, and in no other coun- 

 try has this science ever been so successfully 

 pursued as here, assert that with grafted trees 

 ibis is always the case ; that the graft being 

 part of an old tree, is not renovated by the new 

 slock into which it is inoculated (grafted); but 

 lirings with it the diseases and the age ol Ih.it 

 from which it has been taken, and dirs at Ike 

 same lime of natural decay, lis life, like that 

 of the fabled Hamadryads, ends with ihat of 

 Ihe trunk from which it sprung." .Mr Southey 

 adds in a note, " Hudibras might have added 

 this illustration to his well known simile of the 

 new noses." That simile we all recollect, 

 and we shall introduce it here ivith a slight al- 

 teration of a word-- 



" Wlien life of parent " stock " was out, 

 " Off Jropt tlie syiiip-itlietic " sprout. 



We have quoted this dislich of Ihe poet, be- 

 cause we alluded to it in our first piece callin'» 

 the theory of Knight in question. We said Ihe 

 grafts died by " symfiathy." This is not 

 perfectly correct — we used that word for want 

 of a more convenient one. There is nopassioifj 

 or affeciion in plants, llie whole system is mere- 

 ly physical. We ought not, therefore, to say 

 that the newly grafted trees decay and die by 

 "sympathy." Neither can we call it by an 

 idiosyncrastj, peculiar to an individual of Ihe spe- 

 cies, though there would be some propriety In 

 saying it was an idio.^yncrasy peculiar to the 

 family. In short, there is no word in the lan- 

 guage which will express J\Ir Knight's idea — 

 and the reason is, there never was, before Mr. 

 Knight's notion, any thing yf the kind in exist- 

 ence which required a word to express it. We 

 are justified therefore in using Ihe quotation 

 from Hudibras — and we shall be well understood 

 when we say that the gr.ids die by sympathy. 



Bui we have not yet done with the hypolhe- 

 sis of Mr Knight. The truth is, it goes mucl» 

 farther than has yet heen developed, and much 

 farther than any of his rommenlators secra will- 

 ing to acknowledge. Mr Knight not only maia- 



