40 
NATIVE PLUMS. 
The Chickasaw Plum ( Prunus cliickisa) found indigenous from North- 
ern Illinois to the Gulf of Mexico, and the wild yellow or red plum 
( Prunus americana) found indigenous over nearly the whole continent. 
These are two quite distinct races (for they cannot be regarded as dis- 
tinct species) of the subgenus Prunus of the Almond family ( Amygdalea ), 
order Rosacem. And a typical tree of either so-called species is very 
distinct in fruit, foliage, and general appearance from a typical tree of 
the other. But so far as we are concerned in this study of them they are 
practically the same, except that the fruitof the P. americana , or North- 
ern type, has much the thicker, tougher, and more acerb skin, and that 
some of the Chickasaw, or Southern type, do not provehardy far North, 
i. e.,some of the named varieties, while others do, and the same would 
undoubtedly prove true of P. americana. But as this last is found gro w- 
ing wild, and with good varieties, at least as far north as the northern 
limit of Dakota, these native plums are a fruit in some of their varieties 
perfectly adapted to every part of the United States and '.territories and 
pre-eminently the fruit of the great Northwest. 
Yet, as a rule, those who have taken these wild plums from their na- 
tive thickets and planted and carefully cultivated them, in hope of find- 
ing at least a poor substitute for the Garden Plum, have met with a com- 
plete, decisive failure. They got no fruit. We, the older settlers of 
the W T est (Illinois), knew the wild plums as the most plentiful and use- 
ful of the wild fruits when the country was first settled and when our 
u tame ” plums failed (for it is a fact that in this part of Illinois as early 
as 1845 we fruited many varieties of the Garden Plum, Nectarines, 
Peaches, and Apricots in abundance, with no injury from the Plum Cur- 
culio, or u rot”). We began to hunt out and plant the finer varietiesof 
the u wild ” ones, some of which were most beautiful, large and fine, and 
of very good quality. But after years of patient waiting we found that 
these gave no fruit in their new homes, except very rarely. We found 
that the young fruit developed to the size of a little pea, or a little larger, 
and indeed often to more than half its full size, and then all fell off. 
This fallen fruit, if examined, showed very generally the ovipositing 
marks of the Plum Curculio, made when laying her eggs. 
It is not necessary here to give the complete natural history of this 
insect, because all the more important facts and their practical bear- 
ings have been recorded by competent writers, and especially by Walsh 
in his first report as State entomologist of Illinois, and by Eiley in his 
third report on the insects of Missouri ; but it will be sufficient to say that 
it is a small insect of the Curculio (Curculionidcv) or snout-beetle family 
that deposits its eggs under the skin of the young fruit of all the smooth- 
skinned species of the Almond family, or nearly all of them, and some 
other fruits as well. The eggs are deposited in little holes eaten through 
