1894.] ESSAYS. ' 29 



sylvania, twenty to forty years or more ago, both the apple and the 

 peach were as certain crops as oats or barley ; now there are plenty of 

 thrifty trees, but rarely are they fruited. I have visited this region 

 almost every summer for thirty years, driven about a great deal and seen 

 plenty of evidence of the change. Everyone in the vicinity speaks of it. 

 It is not simply the decadence in vigor and fertility of old trees, but I 

 know an orchard of young apple-trees set out from thrifty nursery 

 stock eighteen or twenty years ago, on ground never before set to 

 fruit, and still as thrifty in appearance as any fruit trees could be, and 

 yet on a hundred trees together, on a fertile soil, I have not been able 

 in any of ten years to find a peck of apples. 



I was told that the last summer a Baldwin apple could not be found 

 in Chautauqua county. 



2. Secondly, in some regions there are fair crops of fruit three or 

 four years out of ten, and one year in ten the production may be 

 abundant, — the general tendency being to a decrease in production. 



3. Thirdly, it is true that some years in large areas, extending over 

 many States, there is a general scarcity of some kinds of fruit, as this 

 year of apples all over the eastern and northern United States. 



4. Fourthly, in some localities fruit-bearing is uniform unless pre- 

 vented by manifest or easily-explained causes — uniformity is the rule, 

 barrenness the rare exception. This is the case with oranges, guavas, 

 lemons, etc., in .Southern Florida, and with the same and other fruits 

 in Southern California, with oranges in Crete, figs in Smyrna, and 

 dates in Egypt. 



o. Fifthly, it is also true that in a very restricted locality trees of 

 the same kind of fruit and of the same variety, planted at the same 

 time, under the same cultivation, both thrifty, bear very differently. 



It is granted that each kind and each variety of the kinds of fruit 

 has, to a large extent, its peculiar habitat, or natural soil and climate. 

 And yet some fruits are very widely distributed, as the strawberry, the 

 cherry, and to a less extent the apple. Some fruits are limited more 

 by soil, others by temperature. 



With these limitations, this paper has nothing to do. We cannot go 

 beyond the fact that strawberries do not fruit well on a heavy clay 

 soil, and the other fact that apples love clay and abhor sand ; that 

 neither fruit trees nor forest trees thrive where exposed to incessant 

 or frequent gales of wind, and that drought on the one hand and 

 excess of moisture on the other may ruin not only the product, but 

 often the tree itself. 



Moreover, we all understand that freezing either the ovary or the 



