110 BOARD OP AGRICULTURE. 



Dr. Reed, of Pittsfield. We have for a few years past been 

 troubled with a new worm, which has destroyed our finest 

 sweet apples. It appears to be entirely different from the worm 

 which has so infested the apple, and is about half the size of 

 that worm. While other insects lay the egg in the blow, this 

 worm eats inward and goes where he pleases, to the complete 

 destruction of the apple. I can give you nothing of its history, 

 but I hope some one may be able to tell us what the insect is, 

 what time it deposits its eggs, and some way by which we can 

 destroy him. Its ravages are entirely confined to the sweet 

 apple and the milder kinds of the sour apple. I think the time 

 has passed by in which they do most of their mischief. They 

 commence with the Newtown Sweet, and destroy that apple 

 almost entirely, in many instances. They then attack the later 

 sweet apples. So far as I know, there are but few of them in 

 the late apples. 



The President. This whole question of fruit culture is now 

 open for discussion. There are many gentlemen here competent 

 to discuss it, and I hope some one of them will take the floor 

 and set the ball in motion. 



Mr. FooTE, being called on to lead the discussion on that sub- 

 ject, said that twenty-one years ago some day in October last, 

 surrounded by a goodly company of gentlemen gathered from 

 nearly every State in the Union, — gentlemen the lineaments of 

 whose features and the tone of whose voices (many of them now 

 silent in death,) his memorable friend would readily recall at 

 the mention of such names as Goodale, of Maine, Manning, 

 Hovey and Walker, of Massachusetts, Barry, Thomas, Wilson, 

 Robert Parsons, Samuel C. Parsons, Charles Downing, and the 

 master-spirit in that movement, the lamented A. J. Downing, of 

 New York, Reid and Hancock, of New Jersey, Brinkle and 

 Hare, of Pennsylvania, Elliot, of Ohio, Phoenix, of Illinois, 

 Allen, of Missouri, Taylor, of Virginia, and others, — he had 

 the privilege to be present at the birth, and to assist at the 

 christening of the American Pomological Society ; and not only 

 that, but to unite his voice in the unbroken harmony of all the 

 voices present in declaring the Hon. Marshall P. Wilder its first 

 president, an honor with which he had been reinvested, with no 

 less unanimity, at each successive meeting of the society since, 

 and that gentleman stood before them to-day, and before the 



