HORTICULTURAL JOURNAL. 41 
THE YELLOWS IN THE PEACH TREE. 
Dear Sir : Either your printer or my own pen made a great error in 
my article on the Peach tree. I expected to see in print the statement that 
"we rarely see a Peach tree stricken with the yellows on & northern slope;" 
and not as it reads "on a southern aspect." While making the correction, 
I beo; to add a few more remarks on this troublesome disease. 
I think most of our fruit growers who have endeavored to account for this 
disease have scarcely pushed their investigations far enough, and by stopping 
short at vai'ious points of the examination, produced a variety of opinions, 
which would have harmonized with each other if carried out to their fullest 
extent. My views, therefore, are not to be placed to my own credit ; but 
to be carried to the account of different writers, whose opinions I will en- 
deavor merely to systematize and push into their proper places. 
I have said that a Peach tree on a northern aspect is seldom afflicted by 
the "Yellows," and I say seldom to avoid the appearance of dogmatic 
certainty. In my own experience, I have never seen a "Yellowed" Peach 
tree under this circumstance ; but I do not wish to be understood as teach- 
ing that a Peach tree will not get the yellows, because it may be on a 
northern slope. 
• The immediate cause of the disease, I hold to be the rapid and constantly 
varying action of severe frosts and warm suns on the moisture in the 
branches of the Peach tree during winter, and the predisposing cause, any- 
thing that tends to encourage a large supply of moisture to be stored up in 
the branches, or, when so stored up, to expose it to the action of warm sun 
in the winter season. 
The circumstance that first set me on this train of reasoning, was a very 
simple one. Some few years ago, after a severe winter, a fine specimen of 
Evonymus japonicus, which for the few seasons before grew very vigorously, 
pushed forth in a very weak manner. From the base, and just beneath the 
surface of the ground, however, very vigorous shoots came up, so much so, 
that I was several times tempted to cut the whole head entirely away, in 
spite of my hopes that it would ultimately recover its crippled condition. 
Towards the end of summer, the leaves lost the dark green so characteristic 
of this plant, and presented a shade many times brighter than those on the 
vigorous base shoots. Next year, the second from the hard winter, the 
leaves were completely yellow, as much so as any Peach tree I ever saw in 
such a state. The head was then cut away, and the wood examined and 
found to be entirely dead, with the exception of two very thin circles of 
