718 TRANSACTIONS OF THE AMERICAN INSTITUTE. 



of Winkfield, As I have nothing to saj' in favor of the two former it is 

 best to say nothing. The Vicar of Winkfield is a good cooking pear. 



LARGE PEARS — HOW TO GROW THEM. 



In Hovey^s Horticultural Review, vol. 25, page 171, he says : The proprie- 

 tor of the Pomological Gardens in Sacramento, California, exhibited at one 

 of the meetings of the society in 1858, a Bartlett pear which measured 17 

 inches in the largest circumference, afld 13 inches in its lateral, and 

 weighed 27 ounces avoirdupois. Also, from that paradise of fruits a Swans 

 Orange was exhibited that weighed 20 ounces avoirdupois. Mr. Hovey 

 says the largest pear he ever saw of this variety raised in Boston, weighed 

 13 ounces, and the largest Bartlett 11 ounces. The model of a Duchess 

 d'Angouleme described by J. J. Smith, then editor of the Horticulturist 

 was represented by him as weighing 35| ounces avoirdupois, and measur- 

 ing 17| inches in its longitudinal and 15^ inches in its cylindrical diameter; 

 said to have been grown by a New Jersey orchardist, and is believed to 

 have been the largest pear grown of any of the good varieties, at any rate, 

 the largest on record. Without describing the process by which the speci- 

 men before us was developed into its mammoth proportions, we would say 

 the French cultivators who have long excelled in this department of pomo- 

 log3' have detailed with such minuteness the process by which such results 

 ha%'e been obtained, that we may now regard the development of large 

 specimens of fruit, not as freaks of nature, but the result of the observa- 

 tion of the laws touching the vegetable, as fixed and invariable as any 

 that obtain in the animal economy. These processes are such as train- 

 ing, pruning, pinching, thinning and watering, or as a substitute for it, 

 mulching. An increase in the size of the fruit has so commonly been 

 observed to follow the judicious pruning of an orchard, that if you would 

 have good fruit you must prune for it, is as accepted a fact as is the decla- 

 ration of our Saviour that the branch that beareth fruit if purged (or 

 pruned) will bring forth more fruit. We need scarcely stop to say that 

 the sap that would have gone to the support of the lopped off branches, 

 now contributes to the increase of the developing crop of fruit. Akin to 

 this in its effect tipon the fruit, is the pinching of the shoot while it io yet 

 tender, arresting the flow of sap that is destined to extend the shoot by 

 the formation of wood and bud and leaf, which now by its sudden arrest ia 

 converted into fruit. By no mysterious operation then will a judicious re-, 

 moval of a part of the shoots of a previous year's growth be followed by an 

 increase in the size of the fruit. It has been often observed that the largest 

 fruit would be found upon a spar from the trunk of one of the principal 

 branches, possibly from the trunk itself. And no marvel, for such position 

 is in proximity to the greatest and most abundant flow of sap, and the de- 

 mands of the evolving fruit is most easil}'' met. The ox thrives most nearest 

 the master's'crib. The vegetable physiologist accepts the fact of the influ- 

 ence that lines and angles have upon the circulation of the fluid through 

 the vessels, facilitating or retarding its flow, and hence prunes so as to 

 secure the free and uninterrupted flow of the sap to the fruit distributed 

 along the branches, freel}^ lopping off those that start out directly and at 

 right angles from the trunk of the tree. The overloading of the branches 



