CONFERENCE ON SPRAYING OF FRUIT TREES. 338 



in certain conditions of their life that emulsions affect them. Therefore 

 let us still rely on arsenate of lead. 



Lastly, I want to refer to the vegetable washes. All those washes 

 which I have referred to containing metals and oils are injurious ; no 

 matter how well they are mixed or put on, they always do a certain 

 amount of harm to the trees. We get just the reverse if we use a 

 vegetable wash. If you use tobacco, or if you use quassia, you find 

 no damage done to the trees. If you use quassia and soft soap for the 

 destruction of the apple sucker, we will say in the trusses of blossom, 

 you find it penetrates very much deeper into the trusses than where you 

 use paraffin emulsion. If you use tobacco wash you will find it penetrates 

 with even greater power than quassia, and at the same time you will 

 find that the tobacco does no harm to the apple blossom, and, moreover, 

 above this penetrating power it has, the same as quassia, a certain 

 deterrent effect. It may not last for long, but even if you keep winged 

 aphis off for a very little while it is doing some good. So that in tobacco 

 we have an insecticide which does no harm, and is much more penetrating 

 than emulsions, and a wash which may possibly do good in another way 

 by keeping insects off the plant. There is a great drawback, the expense, 

 which unfortunately has got to be considered ; but I very much doubt if 

 it is not better, where we have a bad attack of aphis year after year, to give 

 it one good spray with tobacco wash than several with emulsions which may 

 be cheap, because of the penetrative power of the tobacco. If you spray 

 after rain, or a small amount of rain comes after spraying, you will find 

 a wash like tobacco wash is enhanced. The wash is taken by the rain or 

 moisture deep into the trusses where the suckers live, and there they are 

 readily destroyed, not only by the contact of a small amount of soft soap, 

 which I think you should always use with tobacco, but by the nicotine 

 poison itself, which is just as fatal to insect life, as far as we know, as to 

 animals higher in the scale of life. 



Such are some of the insecticides and acaricides in use or being 

 experimented with. It will be said they are very numerous, but one 

 must not expect that the few scientists who have worked at this subject 

 could do more for fruit growers in less than a quarter of a century than 

 medicine has done for man in many hundreds of years. 



Cleanliness of the trees must be aimed at, and any one of those winter 

 washes referred to will cleanse them ; but when we come to check any 

 specific parasitic disease we must use what remedy is fitted for that 

 purpose and not expect that any one will cure the lot. Moreover we 

 must remember it is very easy to physic a man who is not ill, but it is 

 waste of money, and the same may be said of our fruit trees. Too 

 frequently one sees washing going on where there is nothing to destroy. 

 Spraying can only do a certain amount of good, and the more cautiously 

 growers go to work with this necessary adjunct of fruit growing, the more 

 money they will keep in their pockets. 



For even when spraying is necessary and does good we must still bear 

 in mind that in destroying the disease the remedies too often weaken the 

 plant. Keep up the health of the trees by cultivation and general 

 attention. Destroy all old and dead wood, and the various diseases which 

 necessitate our spraying will be lessened. 



