600 THE PEACH. 



, 



poverished soil was no longer able to recruit its energies by an 

 nual growth, and gradually became more and more enfeebled 

 and short-lived. About 1800, or a few years before, attention 

 was attracted in the neighbourhood of Philadelphia to the sud- 

 den decay and death of the orchards without apparent cause. 

 From Philadelphia and Delaware the disease gradually extended 

 to New Jersey, where, in 1814, it was so prevalent as to destroy 

 a considerable part of all the orchards. About three or four 

 years later it appeared on the banks of the Hudson (or from 

 1812 to 1815), gradually and slowly extending northward and 

 westward, to the remainder of the State. Its progress to Con- 

 necticut was taking place at the same time, a few trees here and 

 there showing the disease, until it became well known (though 

 not yet generally prevalent) throughout most of the warmer 

 parts of New England. 



It should be here remarked that, though the disease had beeu 

 considerably noticed in Maryland and the Middle States pre- 

 viously, yet it was by no means general until about the close of 

 the last war. At this time wheat and other grain crops bore 

 very high prices, and the failing fertility of the peach-orchard 

 soils of those States was suddenly still more lowered by a heavy 

 system of cropping between the trees, without returning any- 

 thing to the soil. Still the peach was planted, produced a few 

 heavy crops, and declined, from sheer feebleness and want of 

 sustenance. As it was the custom with many orchardists to 

 raise their own seedling trees, and as almost all nurserymen 

 gathered the stones indiscriminately for stocks, it is evident that 

 the constitutional debility of the parent trees would naturally be 

 inherited to a greater or less degree by the seedlings. Still the 

 system of allowing the tree to exhaust itself by heavy and re- 

 peated crops in a light soil was adhered to, and generation after 

 generation of seedlings, each more enfeebled than the former, 

 at last produced a completely sickly and feeble stock of peach 

 trees in those districts. 



The great abundance of this fruit caused it to find its way 

 more or less into all the markets on the sea-coast. The stones 

 of the enfeebled southern trees were thus carried north, and, 

 being esteemed by many better than those of home growth, 

 were everywhere more or less planted. They brought with 

 them the enfeebled and tainted constitution derived from the 

 parent stock. They reproduced almost always the same disease 

 in the new soil ; and thus, little by little, the Yellows spread from 

 its original neighbourhood, below Philadelphia, to the whole 

 northern and eastern sections of the Union. At this moment 

 it is slowly but gradually moving west ; though the rich and 

 deep soils of the western alluvial bottoms will, perhaps, for a 

 considerable time, even without care, overpower the original 

 taint of the trees and stones received from the east. 



