94 THE APPLE-TREE 



Pear-Tree." "When certain blue spirits begin to flit 

 about me," he writes, "I depart from my study to go and 

 read, in what I am allowed, even by my clerical uncle, 

 to call my book of devotions. The devotions I mean are 

 not in my book-case. No publisher, if he ever thought 

 of such a thing, could bring them out. They are a page 

 of the book of Nature, opened in the country, under blue 

 sky, displayed at all season." What a marvelous com- 

 pany Van Bruyssel found on his old pear tree ; and what 

 inexhaustible worlds did Fabre discover in the lives of 

 the spider, the fly, the caterpillar, the wasps, the mason- 

 bees and others ! 



Therefore we need not pause with the other four 

 hundred and more insect citizens of the apple-tree. Some: 

 of them, as the San Jose scale, are not peculiarly apple- 

 tree insects. My tree has another crew of inhabitants, 

 and to this company we may now have introduction. 



The spots on the leaves and fruits are not deposits 

 of dirt or are they caused by mysterious conditions in 

 the atmosphere, as once supposed, nor is it in the nature 

 of leaves to be spotted and of fruits to be scabby; nor 

 are the one-sided dwarfed fruits merely accidents. The 

 organism responsible for these blemishes is less evident 

 than the codlin-moth; yet what fruit-grower knows the 

 eggs of the codlin-moth? But the organisms are as 

 definite as are the insects ; no longer are the fungi things 

 without form and without positive cycles. 



On the ground are apple leaves, shed in the autumn. 

 On the leaves are spots or lesions, — injured or "diseased" 

 — infected with the apple-scab fungus. Under a good 

 microscope the investigatior finds immature fruiting 

 bodies in these areas. In the early days of Spring, these 



