BLIGHT AND OTHER TREE DISEASES. IOQ 



being the only bearing orchard of any size in south Texas, 

 and knowing its previous immense yields, he took the chances 

 and signed a written exoneration, which paper I still have, 

 of all blame on my part if the trees died. E. J. Biering is 

 still living at Hitchcock and will confirm this statement. 

 That was twelve years ago, and neither plow, cultivator nor 

 pruning-knife have ever been used upon that orchard since, 

 the blight having died a natural death. The trees are lap- 

 ping, though twenty-five feet apart, and will average eighteen 

 inches diameter of trunk near the ground, and were pro- 

 nounced by Professor Waite, during his experimental work a 

 few miles away on the Newson orchard, before mentioned, 

 to be the finest and largest pear trees in the South. It was 

 also recently inspected by Mr. Stiles, assistant state in- 

 spector, who told me that it was "magnificent, the very 

 finest pear orchard he had ever seen." Now, all these years 

 it has cost its owner comparatively nothing except to gather 

 the fruit, the grass having been so dwarfed by decaying 

 leaves and shade as to require no mowing, and yet thousands 

 of pruned, fertilized and cultivated pear trees all around have 

 been killed by blight. 



With this grand, living demonstration of the truth of the 

 principles of the New Horticulture as applied to this disease, 

 it is plain that the theory of an external attack of the bac- 

 teria is false ; for it will not explain such phenomena as the 

 sudden development of blight on those fifteen hundred pear 

 trees with not a case of blight within one hundred and fifty 

 miles, nor the strange fact that they are now all immune, 

 while blight exists all around them. Nor will it explain the 

 fact that I sent blighted leaves and twigs at the time from 

 those trees to E. W. Kirkpatrick at McKinney, where no 

 blight then existed, and though inoculated freely with a decoc- 

 tion of the leaves and twigs, not a single one of his pear trees 

 could be infected. But a still more remarkable fact against 

 the external theory occurred here last summer, and one that 

 I would not mention unless I had an eye-witness like E. W. 

 Kirkpatrick to prove it. With the owner's permission, a 

 near neighbor, I top-budded in 1904 eight limbs of a quite 



