102 THE CONNECTICUT POMOLOGICAL SOCIETY. 



mechanical mixture of sulphur, which is about as nearly useless 

 as anything you can get. 



If you warm your barrel with hot water, use boiling hot 

 water to slake the lime and cover your barrel during the 

 slaking, stirring only when necessary; then the heat from your 

 three pounds of lime will be sufficient to combine one pound of 

 sulphur and if all the precautions have been observed, your 

 self-boiled mixture has cost you just as much as if you had 

 used coal or wood. But you do away with the boiling outfit. 



As I said, we have used in New Jersey all types of lime 

 and sulphur wash and during 1906 we have had the most 

 gratifying success and the most discouraging failure with 

 every one of them. As to the causes I will speak later. 



Crude petroleum, undiluted, as against scale, w^as first used 

 by a Jerseyman with good success on apple trees and he hurt 

 none of his trees and killed the scale. 



It seemed and was a simple proposition. I had been 

 brought up to tlie idea that petroleum was fatal to plant life 

 and I tried it timidly on one badly infested pear tree. It 

 worked perfectly against the scale and the only material in- 

 fluence it had on the tree was to make a standard out of a 

 dwarf. It proved to be really a stimulant for pear trees on 

 further trial and I used it on other trees and went down into 

 the oil fields to see what oil did on vegetation that grew round 

 about. I came back full of faith and I told our folks about it. 

 A great many tried it and were successful and a great many 

 tried it and failed : that is, they killed the insects fast enough ; 

 but unfortunately the tree went also and then they accused me 

 of owning oil stock and trying to enhance its value by inducing 

 them to use oil. Now the only thing I regret in this accusa- 

 tion is that it wasn't true. I never had money enough to buy 

 any of the stock and Mr. Rockefeller never heard enough of 

 the new outlet for oil created by me to offer me any shares or 

 even a professorship in his university. 



But there was one point which no one disputed — crude oil 

 would kill everv scale with which it came into contact, and 

 because of its penetrating power crude oil would reach more 

 insects with less care than any other material and would remain 

 longer on the tree — and there was the rub. It remained so 



