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INTERNAL BROWNING OF YELLOW NEWTOWN APPLE. L7 
badly browned after a season in cold storage. After the recw«ds 
of the work of three seasons were available, however, it was evi- 
dent that this condition does not hold true. In certain instances, 
trees have produced sound fruit a number of years in succession, 
while others have produced fruit with a tendency to bad browning 
in successive years. But this condition by no means holds gener- 
ally, and very often a tree which produces sound fruit one year will 
produce fruit tending to brown very badly the next year. In other 
words, it is impossible to predict what a tree will do, basing the 
prediction on its previous performance record. 
DEFOLIATION AND GIRDLING EXPERIMENTS. 
In order to obtain evidence, if possible, upon the internal condi- 
tion of nutrition in the trees that are associated with the occurrence 
of browning, it was planned during the summer of 1919 to vary the 
nutritive conditions in different parts of the same tree and to deter- 
mine the effect of these treatments on the development of interna! 
_ browning. 
Six trees were selected for special treatment, three of which 
during the preceding year had produced fruit that tended to brown 
badly and three of which had produced fruit that remained sound. 
All trees were bearing heavy crops of fruit. 
Branches as nearly uniform as possible and ranging from 1 to 
24 inches in diameter were selected. On each tree certain branches 
were girdled by removing a ring of bark one-eighth to one-fourth 
inch wide around the branch near its base. Other adjacent and 
similar branches were treated by removing about half the leaf area 
from the branches. Partially defoliated branches in all cases were 
well loaded with fruit, while in the cases of girdled branches the 
number of apples on each branch was reduced by thinning until no 
two fruits were closer together than 5 inches. All of this work was 
done on June 26, 1919, when the fruit was about three-fourths of 
an inch to 1 inch in diameter. Adjacent branches receiving no 
treatment served as checks to the treated ones. 
Fruit on the girdled branches was very large at the time of pick- 
ing, which was in the first week of October. It was yellow tinged 
and well ripened and had a tendency to water core. The fruit on 
branches that were partially defoliated, on the other hand, was 
small and green in appearance at the time of picking. Normal 
fruit on the same trees was intermediate in degree of apparent 
maturity and in size. Chemical analyses made at the time of pick- 
ing and again at the time of the inspection of the fruit upon its 
removal from storage in May, 1920, showed that the fruit from 
girdled limbs was markedly higher in both total sugar and in 
