4885 
405 
SUPPLEMENT TO THE RUSAL NEW-YORKER. 
change on whole branches has frequently 
been recorded, and it is surprising that no 
one has seen that the fact is fatal to any hy¬ 
pothesis of the immediate action of pollen. 
(To be continued.) 
ijodkultuval. 
THE CRESCENT SEEDLING OF THIRTY 
YEARS AGO. 
In looking over some old numbers of the 
Genessee Farmer, I find, in the September 
number for 1852 (vol. 13. No 9), the following 
note, which may be of interest to those of the 
Rural readers who, like myself, had not be¬ 
fore known that Mr. Parmalee had been an¬ 
ticipated in the naming of his excellent straw¬ 
berry the Crescent Seedling; but evidently 
the old variety did not succeed in gaining the 
enviable reputation already established in 
many localities by the new-comer. 
“The Crescent SeedliDg Strawberry,- A very 
remarkable variety of strawberry bearing 
this name, and said to have originated in New 
Orleans, is just now noticed in the papers and 
one nurseryman advertises them at $2,00 per 
plant. Our friend R. G. Pardee Esq., of Pal¬ 
my ra,describes it,in the Rural Nk\v-Yorker ( 
as producing a “constant and abundant supply 
of large, high-flavored, conical, dark red 
strawberries from January to August inclu¬ 
sive, at the end of which time the old plants 
die out, and a few runners strike out with 
which to renew the bed. The New Orleans 
Picayune says, ‘it bears every day(l)’ and isin 
much request all over the country, Mr. 
Lawrence having obtained them himself by a 
happy system of grafting!!) aud crossing. 
Mr. Pardee has not bad this variety bear yet, 
nor has any one else in the North, that we 
have heard of. We therefore advise people 
to keep cool until it has been well tested. The 
Alpine humbug has not yet been forgotten, 
and we very much apprehend that the Cres¬ 
cent may disappoint expectation iu the same 
way. It is not wonderful that in the climate 
of New Orleans any strawberry under good 
culture and management should bear from 
January to August. Growth is so rapid that 
young runners get into a bearing state before 
the old ones are exhausted. 
Give us the climate of New Orleans, and we 
will produce Hovey’s Seedling and Burr’s New 
Pine and all the rest of them, seven months in 
the year; but it cannot so well be doue here.” 
Chittenden Co., Vt. w. H. rand. 
Pomologicitl 
WHAT I KNOW ABOUT RAISING FINE 
NEW VARIETIES OF FRUITS FROM 
SEED. 
IN TWO PARTS. 
JAMES DOUGALL. 
VanMons’s theory for raising fine new va¬ 
rieties of pears was to take a young seedling of 
inferior quality,save the seeds before they were 
fully ripe, reduce the vitality of the young 
trees raised from them by planting them 
thickly; when these bore, their seeds were to 
be saved in tbe same way, and the sume course 
was to bo pursued for six or seven generations, 
aud one would be sure to have excellent fruit 
at last. Ho believed that if the seeds of the 
best varieties were sowed, they would degen¬ 
erate, as these varieties had attained the high¬ 
est degree of perfection, and any change 
woidd be backward to an inferior quality, 
Van Mods, by his system, produced some good 
varieties of pears; but out of some 80,000 so 
raised, the greater part must have been infe¬ 
rior, for among the great number that he 
named aud introduced as of first quality, none 
are now cultivated in this country, or, at most, 
not more than two or three, BeurrtS Diel being 
about tbe best of them, the rest being of me¬ 
diocre quality. 
Kuight of England and many in this country 
advised cross-breeding by artificial fertiliza¬ 
tion, sometimes called hybridizing. Knight’s 
method resulted iu nothing worthy of general 
cultivation, his two best varieties, Knight's 
Monarch and Dunmore (both of which I fully 
tested aud found worthless in thiscouutry), 
were not worthy of cultivation, aud 1 suppose 
are not now to be found in any collection. Nor 
has this plan been in any degree successful on 
this side of the Atlantic. Almost all our best 
.fruits have been chance seedlings, showiug 
that nature, aided by tbe cross fertilization by 
bees and other insects, has done more for us 
than man with all his art can do. 
The idea that all our fine fruits have sprung 
from an original luferior type, such as the 
crab, the wild choke pear, the sloe, etc , is 
hardly tenable; none of these by the beet 
method of cultivation, If kept distinct from 
better varieties, would probablyever produce 
a fruit worth eating. By hybridizing them 
with our best fruits, they may produce new 
types of superior quality; unless this is done, 
I doubt if they would ever change to auy great 
extent. 
Fine fruits were known in the earliest times, 
long before our written records, and as far as 
we know were created at first of the be9t 
quality. Asia appears to have been the origi¬ 
nal habitat of our best fruits, from which 
they have diverged to Europe and other parts 
of the globe. We are ouly beginuing to find 
out that good fruits are to be found iu other 
countries besides those of Western Europe. 
Prof. Budd, of tbe Iowa State Agricultural 
College, at Ames, Iowa, aud Mr. Cbas. Gibb, 
of Abbottsford, Quebec, Canada, by their 
researches in Central Russia have found very 
fair fruit grown in immense quantities in that 
inhospitable climate; but no searches con¬ 
ducted with like care have a9 yet been made 
to any extent in Syria, Armenia, Arabia, Per¬ 
sia, Tartary, and China to procure the finer 
varieties no doubt to be still found iu these 
more temperate regions. 
Our earliest record of the grape is, that after 
tbe flood Noah planted a vineyard, and there¬ 
fore before the flood he must have been well 
acquainted with the qualities of this fruit. 
We find iu Joseph’s time that the grape was 
used in Egypt, the juice of the ripe fruit being 
pressed by the hand into Pharaoh’s cup to 
drink. Later, the Israelite spies found by the 
brook Eschol, in Caanan, bunches of grapes so 
large that it required two men to carry one 
between them on a staff. Grapes are still to 
be found, both wild and cultivated, in great 
abuudauce throughout Palestine, bunches 
weighing from 20 to 30 pounds having been 
often found at Damascus and in the mount¬ 
ains of Judea, some of them 18 inches in 
length, apparently growing wild, as those 
found by the spies evidently were. Other 
fruits—the apricot, peach, cherry, plum, fig 
and date—are all to be found in these coun¬ 
tries, aud though probably not carefully cul¬ 
tivated, are of excellent quality, shewing that 
as far back as our records go, there is not the 
least evidence that they have ever been im¬ 
proved from an inferior type. In tropical 
countries we find the fruits growing wild of 
the best quality, not requiring thi care aud 
cultivation of man to bring them to greater 
perfection. 
The Summer Bon Chretien Pear (one of the 
best, till of late years it became spotted, as 
some other pears and apples now are), the 
origiu of which is unknown, was cultivated 
three hundred years ago. The White Doy¬ 
enne was cultivated two hundred years ago, 
how much earlier we kuow not. The Bartlett 
originated a hundred years ago, loug before 
artificial cross-breediug was thought of; these 
may, therefore, be supposed to have been 
chance seedlings, probably from earlier as 
good or better varieties. To these may be ad¬ 
ded the following list of chance seedlings, 
which really comprise nearly all that are con¬ 
sidered our best, at present in cultivation: 
Duchess d’Angouleme, Flemish Beauty, 
Beurrd d’Anjou, 
BeurrtS Girffard, 
Bloodgood, 
Brandywine, 
Buffum, 
Eliot's Early, 
Louise Boune de Jersey 
Onondaga, 
Seckel, 
Sheldon, 
Tyson, 
Vicar of Wiukfield, 
and nearly all the others which though not 
chance seedlings, have been raised, in the usual 
way by sowing the seeds from the best fruits. 
Wo are therefore led to infer that so far 
from fruits having attained full perfection, 
they are perhaps not equal to those originally 
created, from which through the want of care 
or ungeuial climatic influences, those now con¬ 
sidered inferior have degenerated, and that 
sowing the seed of our best varieties is our 
best plan to obtain fruits of still greater ex¬ 
cellence. 
This has been my method, haviDg carefully 
excluded from my grouuds all fruits of in¬ 
ferior quality to prevent as much as possible 
the bees from crossing these with the finest, 
and so far, I have found it successful. It is 
now many years since I began raising new 
varieties of fruit from seed in this rnanrer. 
farm (Topics. 
WOODPECKERS OUR FRIENDS. 
PROF. A. J. COOK. 
Professor Landois, of Munster, Ger¬ 
many, at the recent gathering of naturalists 
at Magdeburg, gave the remit of bis exami¬ 
nations of the viscera of Westphalian wood* 
peckers, which were undertaken to determine 
tbe ecouomic standing of these birds. He 
finds that the birds investigated are of great 
value. They feed at all times on both animal 
and vegetable matter, but the latter are 
mostly the seeds of coniferous plauts. He 
found great numbers of maggots and plaut 
lice, and concludes that tbe birds are very 
useful in tbe slaughter of many minute in¬ 
sects, some of which are among our most in¬ 
jurious species. He urges that in chiseling 
the bark of trees, the birds do no harm, and 
so he makes out a stainless record for the Ger¬ 
man woodpeckers. 
The above is of interest to us, as birds o£ the 
same family and genus are quite alike in hab¬ 
its the world over. I have given no small 
amount of study to these American wood¬ 
peckers, and find that my researches corrob¬ 
orate, in the main, the conclusions of Pro¬ 
fessor Landois. I studied our sap suckers— 
Picus sillosus aud P. pubescens. In Illinois, 
the yellow-bellied woodpecker—Bphyrapicus 
sarius—is called the sap-sucker. Indeed even 
Coues says they alone deserve tbe name of 
“sap-sucker.” I must differ with Dr. Coues, 
as the birds mentioned above were first called 
sap suckers, and, as I shall show, are well 
worthy of tbe appellation. Hence P. sillosus 
and P. pubescens are by priority and fitness 
entitled to tbe name sap-suckers. I found that 
not only do our sap suckers feed upon such in¬ 
sects as are named by Prof. Landois, but that 
in Winter especially, it is next to impossible 
to examine the stomacb of one without find¬ 
ing several Larvse of the codling moth, and 
grubs of our worst borers. I would often find 
a half dozen grubs of our big-headed apple 
tree borer in a single stomach. Thus the de¬ 
cided usefulness of these birds is clearly es¬ 
tablished. It is no uncommon thing when the 
paper bands used to trap the “apple worms” 
are left on tbe apple trees over Winter, to 
have them fairly riddled by these sap-suckers, 
in quest of the concealed larvse and pupae. 
Nor is such searching confined to Winter, in¬ 
deed, this habit of the birds has often been 
urged as an objection to the use of the paper 
bands. 
1 cun not entirely agree with Prof. Landois 
as to the statement that the birds uever injure 
trees by chiseling tbe bark. This is not entirely 
true of our American woodpeckers. The 
regular punctures so familiar in our ever¬ 
greens—especially pines—our apples, and our 
maples, reminding one of honey-combs, so 
regular are the holes, ofteu extending in exact 
rows for quite a distance in each direction, 
are seldom injurious to the trees, so far as I 
have observed. Yet in one case here on our 
College grounds, a pine, which is a great favor¬ 
ite with the sap-suckers, was so pierced that 
it broke over about three feet from the eartb. 
Yet this tree was not killed, for it branched 
out, aud is now all the more beautiful from 
its accident.. 
It seems quite probable that this gouging 
habit was acquired by searching for insects, 
else why are such trees as harbor numerous 
bark borers—grubs that feed on the inner 
bark—tbe ones that are invariably chiseled. 
I cannot help believing that in searebiug for 
and fishing out the grubs, in which act they 
always get more or less of the juicy bark, they 
haTe acquired a taste for the latter; and at 
last have learued to tap such trees as the piue, 
the apple, and the maple just for tbe juice 
alone. That they do this there is no question. 
I have watched them year after year tapping 
anew the same pine mentioned above, and 
have seen them day after day sipping the fresh 
juice from the tubular punctures. No doubt 
they find in the juice a welcome beverage 
with which to rinse down their insect steak. 
This shows conclusively, contrary to Dr. 
Coues s statement, that our true sap-suckers 
well merit the name first given them by our 
New England naturalists. 
FARM ETHICS. 
In every locality there are chronic borrow¬ 
ers, families who depend upon their neighbors 
for almost everything they have, except food 
and clothes, from the Rural to a thrashing 
machine. Such people are the unfortunate 
victims of their own sbiftlessness, and their 
neighbors’ iujudicious good nature. At this 
season, the question is being presented to every 
farmer: shall I buy or borrow a ueeded tool 
or implement, or shall 1 lend my neighbor 
things which he could and should own t For 
example, a short time ago l purchased a post- 
hole digger. It does its work admirably, aud 
naturally excited the curiosity of my neigh¬ 
bors. I had no less than three applications 
before breakfast one moruiug from neighbors 
who desired to use it for “a little while.” I 
have persistently refused to lend it, not because 
I would be disobliging, but because I think 
there is a principle involved iu this matter, 
which ought uot to be forgotten or ignored. 
In deciding not to lend, unless iu eases of 
urgent necessity, 1 took three thiugs iuto con¬ 
sideration :—first, my duty to uiy neighbor; 
according to the commandment, I am to love 
my neighbor as myself—uot better. While l 
believe in reciprocity to a limited extent be¬ 
tween neighbors, yet the practical result of 
the average interchange is altogether against 
the thrifty and good-natured—the easy lender. 
NotbiDg tends more to destroy a man’s in¬ 
dependence and self-reliance than running 
around the neighborhood for things he ought 
to own himself. True philauthrophy consists 
not so much in helping others, a8 in helping 
others to help thexselves. It is evident that 
my duty to my neighbor does not go so far as 
to require me to permit him to use and per¬ 
haps abuse my property. 
Second, although by purchase may 
have acquired a legal right to use an 
article, yet there are inherent rights which 
the patentee or publisher retains. We will 
suppose that by a large outlay of time aud 
money a man produces a labor-saving device 
or a newspaper. He naturally and rightfully 
expects that those who are benefited by his 
products will reward him for his ingenuity. 
By leuding it I am interfering with its sale 
and tbe ccmseqnent reward of the originator. 
But I am injuring him in another way: for 
example, in the case of the implement men¬ 
tioned. it requires a considerable experience 
to use it to the best advantage. In the hands 
of an ignorant laborer it would doubtless be 
an apparent failure, if iudeed it was not so 
badly damaged as to be unfit for future use. 
I haven't the right to lend to Tom, Diets and 
Harry an implement and thereby jeopardize 
its reputation, if their only interest in it is 
what they can get oat of it. 
Third, comes my duty to myself. If when 
I desire a tool, or to refer to tbe Rural, I find 
that some one has an indistinct recollection 
that Jones or Smith borrowed it; we will sup¬ 
pose that I am fairly good-natured aud that 
I start out in search of the needed article. I 
go down the road to Jones's place and find 
that it wasn’t he who borrowed it; but that 
Smith, a quarter of a mile up the road, is 
the man. I go to Smith’s and find the article 
in a dilapidated condition; t have lost valu¬ 
able time, my temper, and my good will 
toward my neighbor, if, indeed, I have not 
so fur forgotten myself as to use very pointed 
adjectives. 
Lending should not bs confounded with 
loaning for a consideration; in the latter 
case, where equitable compensation is ren¬ 
dered, there is no special obligation on either 
side—noth parties ought to be satisfied. 
Money is a medium for balancing obligations 
and ought to enter iuto neighborly transac¬ 
tions even more than it now does. The old- 
fashioned “bees” were good things for the 
thriftless, lazy farmers—the best farmer and 
the best team usually got the worst of it. 
If we lend ouly in cases of argent necessity 
and then only to those with sufficient integrity 
to return our property in as good condition 
as it was, and a3 soon as they have finished 
using it, we shall save ourselves much trouble 
and annoyance, keep on better terms with 
ourselves and our neighbors, and shall all be 
the better for it. 
My position may be criticized as a narrow 
one, but my experience and conclusion are 
very much like those of the author of the old 
Mother Goose ryme: 
■'I hail a little pony; hts name was Dapple Gray; 
I lent him to a la<ly to ride a mile away; 
She whipped him, she lashed him, she rode him 
through the mire; 
I would not lend my pony now, for all the lady's 
hire '* 
J. H. GRIFFITH. 
GRAPE GROWING. 
At one of the sessions of the Mississippi Val¬ 
ley Horticultural Society, at tbe N. O. Exposi¬ 
tion, tbe subject of grape growing was very 
fully discussed, and especially the practice of 
bagging grapes. Just at this time it will be 
of iuterest to know the experience and opin¬ 
ions of our most successful growers on these 
points. I therefore give a ooudeused sum¬ 
mary from a verbatim report which I made. 
Mr. Hoffman, of Kansas, said they would 
have no trouble in growing grapes there, were 
it uot for the rot. Dr. Hape, Georgia, was 
sorry they were not free from rot in his State, 
though they were comparatively successful 
otherwise. The rot was like pear-blight—much 
had been written and said about it; but ouly 
very little done and no progress made. About 
Atlanta they had used cloth bags over the 
bunches with success. He saw bunches of 
the Champion weighing 22 ounces. H tuds 
would put on 1,000 bags per day. Bags pro¬ 
longed the season aud protected from rot. He 
did not know of a single failure in his vicinity 
where the bags were used. Bags should oe put 
on just after the bloom until the fruit is the 
size of shot. Mr. Cay wood, New York, said 
bags would undoubtedly protect from rot,and 
