96 
AMERICAN POMOLOGICAL SOCIETY. 
seems to be easily impressed with the pollinating sort. 'Another interesting 
peculiarity of this tree is, that while it is a tardy bearer its seedlings have 
thus far proven the earliest in bearing of the many varieties with which I 
have experimented. 
Fourth, by hybridizing the native crab or wild apple with the best American 
sorts, or by development with pure seedlings. I am aware that in introducing 
this subject I am stepping upon uncertain ground, and shall present it from 
the standpoint of an observer and experimenter only. Mr. Peffer once in- 
formed the writer that there were two or three groves of native crabs on 
his land at Pewaukee, Wisconsin, that were so like the Soulard that he 
could not distinguish one from the other. Mr. D. B. Wier as quoted by Prof. 
Bailey in his “Evolution of Native Fruits,” says: “That along the streams 
in Northern Illinois I have seen many wild crabs the superior of the Soulard 
in every characteristic.” Mr. Wier had seen one, and had heard of two or 
three instances of these native crabs having bright red cheeks. The writer 
also saw one in an early day in the settlement of Iowa near his present home, 
with a distinctly bronzed cheek, and a group of them in Wisconsin in 1850, 
with fruit that was quite yellow with specks similar to the Swaar Apple- 
flesh exceedingly crisp and juicy, with much less acerbity than is common to 
the race— and almost transparent when fully ripe; these trees, fully twenty 
fleet high, grew in an opening in the woods just off a small prairie in eastern 
Wisconsin. Some miles west of my present home, in the early settlement of 
the county, there was a grove of oblong apples of large size, flattened at the 
poles like the Grimes Golden, and the tree was unlike in form any that I had 
ever seen; the apples were of just such form as the Hamilton crab, which 
by the way, has nearly as much of a cultivated look as the Grimes Golden. 
The? Mercer, brought to notice by Mr. N. K. Fluke, of Davenport, Iowa, is 1 
larger, I believe, than the Mathews crab that is figured by Prof. Bailey in 
his work just referred to. And your President, I understand, has the honor 
of presenting to the public one that is still larger than either of the above. 
Mr. N. K. Fluke cross-fertilized the Mercer crab or native apple on a larger 
scale than any other one within my knowledge, using the Mercer and 
pollenizing it with the Baldwin and other well-known winter apples. He 
succeeded in growing more than one hundred hybrids. The writer has ten 
varieties of the best appearing ones, top-worked three years ago to test their 
hardiness and value. A very surprising thing about them is, that there is 
scarcely a trace of the native leaf apparent on any of them; the entire col- 
lection sent me seemed to have the native crab almost entirely eliminated, 
judged by the appearance of the trees on my own ground. Among my experi- 
ments I used the pollen of the Hamilton crab on the German Borsdorf, with 
the result that in three seedlings, the characteristics of the native crab leaf 
is entirely obliterated; and in one at least, the leaf and general appearance 
of the trees is far better than the Borsdorf. When using the Soulard as the 
pollinating variety the influence of the cultivated apple was not nearly so 
apparent. If the Soulard is a hybrid of Pyrus. Malus it should have shown 
more evidence of it in its seedlings; the few seedlings that I have grown 
from it, at three different plantings, have generally been very inferior in 
tree and strongly resembles the common crab or Pyrus coronaria. Whatever 
it may be, whether a hybrid of either Pyrus Ioensis or Pyrus coronaria with 
Pyrus Malus, or pure coronaria . I have the second generation of its seedlings 
just coming into bearing; this tree is certainly an anomaly, being of an 
exceedingly upright growth, as much so as a Lombardy poplar, leaves 
