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AMERICAN POMOLOGICAL SOCIETY. 
James Wilson, Secretary of Agriculture, to secure new seeds and plants for 
the United States Department of Agriculture in the dry parts of eastern 
Russia, Central Asia, China and Siberia. Prof. R. Schroeder, the venerable 
head of the horticultural department, has been in the government service 
over fifty years. He said that the Russian method of preventing the root- 
killing of apple trees was to use the true Siberian crab,' Pyrus baccata, as stock. 
The seedlings are transplanted into nursery rows and budded at the usual 
time in August. The trees make a good growth in the nursery, bear at 
least two years earlier in orchard, and are dwarfed somewhat in size of tree. 
In the southern parts of Russia, as at Kiev, where even French pears are 
grown, I found the nursery stocks to be mostly ordinary apple seedlings from 
Germany and France, as they were cheaper than apple seedlings of Russian 
origin, which were difficult to obtain in commercial quantities. (A similar 
state of affairs obtains in our eastern states where crab seedlings imported 
from France, or grown from imported seed, are at times cheaper than seed- 
lings from seed saved at our cider mills.) 
Pyrus baccata is the hardiest known species of the apple and is hardy even 
at the agricultural experiment station at Indian Head, about 350 miles west 
of Winnipeg on the Canadian Pacific Railway, where the thermometer goes 
down to 52 degrees or more below zero. It is found especially in the Trans- 
baikal section of Siberia, east of Lake Baikal, where the climate is purely 
continental. The coldest month has a temperature of minus 28 degrees C. 
(or minus 18.4 degrees Fahrenheit), the hottest month 19 degrees C., (or 66.2 
degrees Fahrenheit.) Difference between winter and summer temperature 
42 degrees C. (or 75.6 Fahrenheit). The mean annual temperature is 2 3-4 
degrees C., (or 27.05 degrees Fahrenheit). A Russian government report says: 
“As for the mean temperature of the vegetative period, although it is 1-2 
degree below that of the cultivated zone of eastern Siberia, amounting to only 
13.5 degree, yet the cereals, notwithstanding the constantly frozen soil in 
some places of this country at a depth of 1V 2 arshine (42 inches), ripen well, 
thanks to the more powerful action of the sun’s rays, depending not only on 
the southerly situation of the Transbaikal, but also on the cloudless and trans- 
parent atmosphere, as compared with the cultivated regions of eastern and 
western Siberia. 
“In reference to the amount of rainfall, the climate of Transbaikalia is also 
incomparably more continental than that of the agricultural zone of Eastern 
and Western Siberia. The quantity of moisture precipitated here in the 
course of the whole year does not exceed 290 millimeters (11.42 inches), instead 
of the 360 and 380 of the agricultural zones of Eastern and Western Siberia, 
while the winters are almost entirely snowless, with 13 millimeters (.51 inches) 
during the whole season. Fortunately the summer rainfall, as much as 200 
millimeters (7.87 inches), is considerably higher not only than that in Eastern, 
but than that in western Siberia, and the conjunction of these conditions ex- 
plains the fact that the Transbaikal country may even today be considered 
the chief granary of the whole Amour-Littoral region.” 
The above facts tend to show why Pyrus baccata does not root-kill in 
Russia, Dakota, or Assinaboia. Young seedlings of this species raised last 
year at Brookings from seed obtained by the writer while in Russia, as well 
as one year old trees secured in Russia at the same time, came through last 
winter in perfect condition. 
I will describe a one-year-old tree of Pyrus baccata odorata, which survived 
the winter, whip-grafted on a piece-root of Vermont apple seedling. The 
