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quires more attention than is necessary for those intended 

 for other trees. The fruit should be quite ripe so that the 

 seeds come away from the flights of the core. It should not 

 be allowed to dry out, but should be drill-sown while still 

 s jf t in deep rich soil that has been previously trenched and 

 manured. If the ground has been enriched with a little 

 wood-ash, to supply potash salts, it will be all the better. 

 The seedlings then have a chance of vigorous growth dur- 

 ing the first year. This is all important, for if not secured, 

 the plants seldom turn out well subsequently, and one 

 often sees poor, starved lots of pear- stock seedlings, three 

 and four years old, raised anyhow in hungry soil, and, 

 despite their age, far less fit for use than stuff grown as 

 here suggested, and only twenty months from the sowing. 

 Budding is to be preferred to grafting, and there is 

 no tree which gives so few failures as the pear, 

 when in good condition, owing to the thickness of 

 the cambium layer on which the buds are worked. To 

 secure a large percentage of buds that take well, it is 

 important to have the stock as vigorous as possible, and 

 decidedly in advance of the vegetative stage to which the 

 bud -sticks have reached. This is secured by selecting the 

 bud-wood some five or six weeks prior to the season most 

 suitable for budding, and carefully laying in the twigs in a 

 sheltered, shady situation in good soil, where they will lie 

 by in a dormant condition while the stocks they are to serve 

 are getting well ahead of them. This adjustment of 

 forward stock-tissues to comparatively backward bud- tissues 

 is a rule of practice invariably observed by the skilled pro- 

 pagator. 



The pear will take kindly to many stocks besides 

 its own. In England it is sometimes grafted on the white- 

 thorn for use in stiff, clayey soil, where pear roots would 

 not thrive. Some fanciers graft on the mountain-ash and 

 medlar. Even apple stocks will carry a pear graft, but the 

 accounts given of the result are contradictory. The 

 American authorities say a pear on apple stock is very short 

 lived, speedily killing itself with profuse fruiting. Stoll, 

 the director of the experiment station at Proskau, recom- 

 mends grafting of pear on vigorous young apple stocks, but 

 acknowledges that their early productiveness is counter- 



