No. 120] 411 



ishment of the growing tree is obtained, chietly in a fluid form, 

 which ascends the trunk, finds its way into the leaves, from 

 thence it is elaborated through the medium of the liber, and 

 transferred throughout the entire tree in the form of sap, bring- 

 ing to perfection in due season the fruit, and the same time form- 

 ing the buds to produce fruit the ensuing year. My plan, there- 

 fore, is to manure the ground in the vicinity of the tree when in 

 full fruit, with all the component parts of tlie fruit bearing bud, 

 which makes its appearance plainly perceptible while the fruit 

 is ripening. The apple- tree being a prodigious bearer requires 

 all the food nature has prepared, to perfect the fruit ; therefore 

 nothing is left to perfect the bud, and without human manage- 

 ment, it dwindles away for the want of proper nourishment, and 

 thus requires the intermediate year to gather strength to permit 

 its vegetable constitutiou to yield a cmp the ensuing 3-ear. If 

 the necessary substances are supplied in sufficient quantity, the 

 tree must bear an annual crop. It may shorten its life, but sup- 

 pose it does, you derive the same quantity by my process in fifty 

 years, that you would if left to nature in one hundred. It has 

 been shown that a very few constituent elements include all the 

 ingredients of the tree — carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, azote — the 

 same form the fabric of man. How wonderful i Who would be- 

 lieve it, had it not been proved by analysis, that such diHerent 

 structures should be composed of the same ingredients, and in 

 the same proportions nearly. Yet this is not more strange and 

 Incomprehensible to mortal man than the incontrovertible fact 

 that the same soil and the same atmospheric influences will pro- 

 duce in the leaf of a grape vine a pleasant acid, and in the leaf of 

 the night sliade, diiectly contiguous to it a deadly poison. Our 

 limited understandings cannot comprehend the agency of the 

 vital principle. 



It has for years been a desideratum to preserve fruits for win- 

 ter's store, by some method not very costlj'. To do this reasona- 

 bly, they should be picked from the tree by hand with great care 

 so as not to break the skin or bruise the fruit in the slightest de- 

 gree, as the par's injured immediately decay, and ruin all the 

 fruit coming in contact. Apples shaken from the tree become 

 more or less injured, and totally unfit to be kept thiou'^li the 

 winter, or even shipped to the nearest ports. My Pippin fruit is 



