(JOO 
THE PEACH. 
poverished soil was no longer able to recruit its energies by an 
nual growth, and gradually became more and more enfeebled 
and short-lived. About 1800, or a few years before, attention 
was attracted in the neighbourhood of Philadelphia to the sud- 
den decay and death of the orchards without apparent cause. 
From Philadelphia and Delaware the disease gradually extended 
to New Jersey, where, in 1814, it was so prevalent as to destroy 
a considerable part of all the orchards. About three or four 
years later it appeared on the banks of the Hudson (or from 
1812 to 1815), gradually and slowly extending northward and 
westward, to the remainder of the State. Its progress to Con- 
necticut was taking place at the same time, a few trees here and 
there showing the disease, until it became well known (though 
not yet generally prevalent) throughout most of the warmer 
parts of New England. 
It should be here remarked that, though the disease had been 
considerably noticed in Maryland and the Middle States pre- 
viously, yet it was by no means general until about the close of 
the last war. At this time wheat and other grain crops bore 
very high prices, and the failing fertility of the peach-orchard 
soils of those States was suddenly still more lowered by a heavy 
system of cropping between the trees, without returning any- 
thing to the soil. Still the peach was planted, produced a few 
heavy crops, and declined, from sheer feebleness and want of 
sustenance. As it was the custom with many orchardists to 
raise their own seedling trees, and as almost all nurserymen 
gathered the stones indiscriminately for stocks, it is evident that 
the constitutional debility of the parent trees would naturally be 
inherited to a greater or less degree by the seedlings. Still the 
system of allowing the tree to exhaust itself by heavy and re- 
peated crops in a light soil was adhered to, and generation after 
generation of seedlings, each more enfeebled than the former, 
at last produced a completely sickly and feeble stock of peach 
trees in those districts. 
The great abundance of this fruit caused it to find its way 
more or less into all the markets on the sea-coast. The stones 
of the enfeebled southern trees were thus carried north, and, 
being esteemed by many better than those of home growth, 
were everywhere more or less planted. They brought with 
them the enfeebled and tainted constitution derived from the 
parent stock. They reproduced almost always the same disease 
in the new soil ; and thus, little by little, the Yellows spread from 
its original neighbourhood, below Philadelphia, to the whole 
northern and eastern sections of the Union. At this moment 
it is slowly but gradually moving west ; though the rich and 
deep soils of the western alluvial bottoms will, perhaps, for a 
considerable time, even without care, overpower the original 
taint of the trees and stones received from the east. 
