Publications of Interest to Agriculturists. 
383 
Flemish Beauty, Heathcote, Kieffer, Le Conte, Manning’s Elizabeth, 
Sechel, Tyson, White Doyenne. 
The failure to secure fertilisation by pollen from other plants of 
the same variety is of the greatest importance to cultivators. Yet 
it is only the confirmation of the more or less self -sterility of the 
flowers borne by an individual plant, seeing that all the separate 
portions of a cultivated variety, on whatever stock they are grown, 
are portions of a single tree. Thus the trees of William pear growing 
in Britain, on the Continent, in America, the Cape and Australia, 
are all parts of the original William tree. By budding or grafting 
the tree has been immensely multiplied, but it has never been repro- 
duced from seed. Each separate fragment, though supported on an 
independent stock, retains all the peculiarities of the original plant. 
In operating, then, with the pollen from the flower of any William 
tree, we are using only the pollen of a different, though now inde- 
pendent, branch of one tree. 
The large orchard of William pears where some of the experi- 
ments were carried on had been planted some seventeen or eighteen 
years. A portion of the site had been a small orchard of different 
varieties, which had been very productive. So the proprietor, to 
secure a valuable orchard, grubbed up the old orchard and planted 
22,000 William trees. He has never been able to get a full crop 
from them. One year the orchard yielded 4,000 boxes of three pecks 
each, being an average of three-fifths of a peck per tree. Similar 
trees twelve years old ordinarily yield four or five times that quantity 
under favourable conditions. In 1891 the crop was only 1,200 boxes, 
and in 1892 it was less than 100 boxes. In the orchard three trees 
of different varieties had been by mistake planted among the 
Williams ; two were Clapp’s Favourite and the other a Buffum. In 
the neighbourhood of these three trees the Williams were very pro- 
ductive, bearing down the branches to the ground with the weight 
of fruit. His previous experiments led Mr. Waite to believe that 
this limited and local abundance was caused by cross-fertilisation 
from the other trees, and this view was fully confirmed by all his 
subsequent experiments. 
Another interesting result of these investigations of Mr. Waite 
is that the fruits which have hitherto been described and figured, 
and been generally known as the type pears of a particular variety, 
are not pure bred but crosses. The fruits obtained in the few 
cases where self-fertilisation was effective were remarkably uniform 
among themselves, but they were smaller and different in form 
from the general crop on the tree ; the seeds enclosed in the fruits 
were small and imperfectly developed, and being without embryos were 
incapable of germinating. On the other hand, the qualities of the 
fruit in these self-fertilised cases were constant : they were more juicy 
and more delicate in flavour than the genei’al crop. In a vigorous, 
full-bearing tree of William pears one or two, or perhaps three, of these 
smaller self-fertilised pears may be found. In future these small pears 
must be studied as representing the pure type of the variety, while the 
modifications in the general crop must be traced to the influence of 
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