173 



Mr. Reed: I want to confirm Dr. Kimball's idea. Where trees are 

 badly subject to curled leaf, to refrain from pruning them until after the 

 weather has become thoroughly settled is the best remedy I have seen as a 

 preventive. The curled leaf is, in my judgment, only the bursting of the 

 sap vessels, caused by severe pruning and changes in the weather. 



Mr. White: I think excessive pruning has not been practiced on some 

 of the trees; it is constitutional with them. It has been stated that it 

 occurred just after a change in the weather. I have watched quite closely 

 the trees to which I was alluding, last summer, and there was just about 

 the same amount of leaves every morning, or every two or three days, that 

 were curled at the same time before, running from May until about the 

 last of August, and then the curled leaf disappeared entirely from that 

 orchard and there came out the growth strong, and vigorous, and new. I 

 went into the orchard the day before I came here, and the growth was as 

 large as most growths ought to be in the whole year; the fruit had been 

 ripened and taken away, and the limbs that had been forced out before 

 the curled leaf entirely ceased have been forced forward. It leaves me 

 entirely at sea. I am not convinced that the theory as to the change of 

 climate is true, and yet I have no better theory to offer, and still it doesn't 

 satisfy me. 



Dr. Kimball: I have had some little experience in planting peach trees, 

 and planting trees and the harvesting of fruit. Now, we find the unfortu- 

 nate condition that a physician does, diagnosing a case of disease and 

 ascertaining the cause; and I know of no other way in treating trees than 

 to go to work by the same mode of reasoning as you would in making out 

 the case of a sick person. Many years ago I had occasion to visit that old 

 veteran peach grower, John B. Crawford, in the northern counties of New 

 Jersey, the original grower of the Crawford peach, which is the predeces- 

 sor of the Foster and other varieties. The old gentleman was then seventy- 

 seven years old. That year there were no peaches in New Jersey, which 

 had already become celebrated as a great peach-growing State. He could 

 not account for it, and went on to narrate to me the methods used in plant- 

 ing peach trees. He said : "I used to plant three hundred acres of peaches ; 

 they were always healthy and produced in the greatest abundance. We 

 made peach brandy; it was one of the most remunerative occupations we 

 could pursue in the days gone by, but we can't raise peaches any more. I 

 have taken trees from the nursery and planted them and given them all 

 due attention;" and from fifty acres of land he had never sent one basket 

 of peaches to the New York or Philadelphia market; that he had taken 

 virgin soil, where trees had always grown in great perfection, and they 

 would not mature peaches, and before they got to be four or five years old 

 they would all die with the curled leaf or yellows. I was not much of a 

 horticulturist in those days, but I went to New York, and could not but 

 reflect on what the old gentleman told me, and was studying in our physi- 

 ology, giving particular attention at that time to the vitality of the human 

 race, and the idea occurred to me, as he had told me that they had planted 

 at that time all seedlings — they did not bud their fruit in those days, but 

 had been raising their trees that way between thirty-five and forty years; 

 and the idea occurred to me that the same laws that applied to the human 

 race might be just as true as regards trees, and so the next time that I 

 went over to New Jersey I suggested it to the old gentleman, and learned 

 more thoroughly their methods of pruning their trees, as to the way they 

 planted their seeds, and when those trees died they used to plant new 

 orchards and budded those varieties right back again, and so they kept on 

 for generations, until the tree had lost its vitality, and the pits, instead of 



