10 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. 



admit that before these causes could be made to endanger 

 seriously the fruitfulness of our trees, some change in the vital 

 powers of the tree itself must have taken place to enable climatic 

 influences which had always existed to work serious injury. It 

 is an evil incident to the cultivation of exhausted soils, tha* the 

 farmer is obliged to feed his crops of all descriptions with 

 manures, concentrated and stimulating, in exact proportion to 

 the degree in which the soil has been drained of its nutritive 

 elements. This course, expensive as it may be, is essential to 

 successful competition, with new soils, rich in the food which 

 provident nature has carefully stored up for her own farming, 

 but must, in accordance with the uniform action of the vital 

 laws, tend to debility and disease. As a consequence of this 

 system, those changes of climate and atmospheric influences, 

 which were intended to promote health, may become, when 

 acting upon the diseased plant, pernicious, and tluis cause the 

 destruction of our fruit. It has been maintained by some 

 persons that the serious failures in fruit have been preceded by 

 unusual quantities of snow, while the ground has remained 

 unfrozen, and the experience of the past year may tend to 

 confirm the observation. Somewhat extensive inquiries seem 

 to point to two facts, which, although they may not be found to 

 be universal, yet are too well established to be entirely over- 

 looked. First, that ungrafted trees bore more profusely than 

 those which had been grafted. Some instances of this occurred 

 where native fruit was matured in comparative abundance, 

 while the fruit of trees grafted with the same native fruit, and 

 growing in close proximity failed entirely, while the proportion 

 of native fruit growing in the pastures, and commonly used for 

 the manufacture of cider, was very much greater than that of 

 grafted fruit raised in cultivated grounds for the market. 



The effects of the common method of cleft grafting, upon the 

 health of the tree, has not received the attention which it 

 deserves. A careful examination of many grafted limbs 

 indicates the fact that the cleft made for the insertion of the 

 scion never heals, but remains as a covered wound probably 

 during the life of the limb, and the tongue by which it is fixed 

 in its place remains within the cleft and very often decays there, 

 and must always be a source of irritation as a foreign body. 

 It is by no means unusual to find incipient decay connected with 



