Arsenical Poisoning of Fruit Trees. 
3 1 
The Part Played By Water. 
I know that Prof. Whipple had this condition in mind as much as 
any other when he made the statement that soil conditions seem to 
have no relation to the disease and! I also had it in mind when I cor¬ 
roborated his statement. This trouble appears on high as well as 
low ground, on sandy soil as well as in heavy soil. The pear tree shown 
in Plate IV stands in a light sandy loam with a decidedly sandy sub¬ 
soil changing to gravel at the depth of four feet. I sunk a hole a little 
deeper than this at a season when the whole country was being irri¬ 
gated, namely, at the time of the autumn irrigation and at a depth of 
a little over four feet this soil was almost dry. I have seen trees 
drowned but the water in these cases had risen quite to the surface 
and had remained there for a long time, how long I do not know. 
These trees do not belong to this class. 
In this connection I will again state that trees killed by nitre 
poisoning present nothing in common with those killed by irritant ar¬ 
senical poisoning. Trees killed by nitre generally have perfectly healthy 
crowns and roots. Most of the cases that I have examined have had per¬ 
fect crowns, in fact I think that they always have unless there is some 
complication of trouble, as irritant arsenical and nitre poisoning, in 
which case the tree might die of nitre poisoning though it had a cor¬ 
roded crown. 
There is an orchard which I am convinced has suffered several 
years from a rising water plane and an excessive quantity of nitre. 
This orchard is drained by a 7x6 inch box drain which discharges a 
large amount of water but it is not sufficient. The water discharged 
from this drain carries 637.2 grains of mineral matter in each imperial 
gallon of which 14.5 grains was sodic nitrate or its equivalent. The 
crowns of these trees and the roots at the crown are apparently per¬ 
fect but the trees are in bad 1 condition and many of them have been 
removed. The distal ends of the roots are killed, rotted off. This I 
believe, has been done by the high water plane. These trees present 
an entirely different case from trees killed by irritant arsenical 
poisoning. 
Trees That Have Not Been Sprayed. 
I introduce this subject for the simple reason that through this 
claim for certain trees I found some very instructive and interesting 
cases. It is a very common thing for persons to state that “those 
trees have never been sprayed.” I have been deceived by this state¬ 
ment so often that I now pay no attention to it at all. I have exam¬ 
ined too many trees that ‘‘have never been sprayed” and found arsenic, 
Conner and lead nre c ent which I consider as establishing a strong pre¬ 
sumption that the tree has been sprayed. In this instance, however, 
I know the owner nersonally and he was so positive and his statement 
wa<^ corroborated by at least one other member of the family, that 
when I saw the trees which I thought were surely not sprayed I did 
not know what to think. I at once saw that I had to examine 
at least two of the trees, for if these trees had not been injured by 
