DISEASES OF TREES 



Diseases of trees are similar to diseases of man- 

 kind. Many times a child while in infancy contracts 

 an imperfection and the child lives and grows to man- 

 hood or womanhood with this imperfection, and later 

 in life develops diseases ; so it is with the tree. We all 

 understand that the wild fruit, which nature created, 

 is the true and only genuine method or system of pro- 

 duction, but by education and enlightenment and ex- 

 perimenting the human mind has developed an im- 

 provement, or in other words a method in which we 

 could improve upon the many varieties of wild fruit. 

 By doing so we to some extent have to cross with na- 

 ture to bring about the most desirable results, and the 

 writer's experience has been that as little variation as 

 possible from nature's own methods produces the best 

 results. For illustration: I will carry some of you 

 old readers back to your boyhood days when father's 

 orchard perhaps reached the age of twenty or twenty- 

 five years. Don't you remember it was more than a 

 ten year old boy could do to make his fingers meet in 

 reaching around the body of father's trees. Today 

 there is scarcely a tree that stands in the orchard or 

 the grove that has reached the age of twenty-five years 

 but what a six year old boy can lay his fingers together 

 around the body. Naturally the reader will ask the 

 question: "Why should this be?" My answer is, that 

 under our continued development of science we have 

 beyond all question of contradiction decreased the vi- 



