40 The Colorado Experiment Station. 
upon the facts believing that no statement of them can be more 
forceful than the facts themselves, but men who may have seen 
many things and never seen the like of this and others also judge 
such things to be impossible because they have not seen them and 
no one has, heretofore, described anything comparable to them. 
In these facts lies my only justification for the following statement 
relative to this case. Some five or six years ago I found in the 
southeast corner of this orchard a few dead trees, killed, as I then 
believed, by nitre. The ground was mealy and had that softness 
under the foot which we have learned to be peculiar to the earlier 
stages of this condition and sometimes persistent throughout the 
course of its development, even to the utter ruination of the land. 
No further trouble seemed to develop in this orchard for several 
years except that this bad area extended slowly from year to year. 
I visited this orchard but once or twice in 1909, and if there was 
any general burning of the orchard I neither saw it nor was it 
called to my attention. That there was some burning is under¬ 
stood, especially in the southeastern section. In 1910, however, 
the burning was very general throughout the ninety acres. A 
portion of the orchard was decidedly bad and many trees, the actual 
number I do not know, died and were removed. 
In the northeastern section of the orchard many trees that 
so far as was known, were in good condition in 1909, were in 
bad condition and the leaves were burning in July, 1910. Even 
I had difficulty in pursuading myself that much of the injury was 
not due to freezing dry. The fact remains, however, that the 
leaves were burning in just the manner that nitre burns them; 
further, the sides and crests of the irrigating furrows were streaked 
with brown, which we have learned to be an almost infallible sign 
of the presence of nitrates. Holes were dug in this section of 
the orchard without striking water but the trees were being in¬ 
jured. In the spring of 1911 a party kindly bored a hole at my 
suggestion to determine the depth of the water plane; he found 
the soil dry at a depth of six and a half feet. At the time of my 
last visit to this orchard, May 30, 1911, the trees at this point had 
not yet begun to burn. The leaves were large and deep green in 
color. One would infer from the conditions as they presented 
themselves that too little water had been applied to this section. 
I have no contour map of this orchard but this northeastern section 
is patently the highest portion of it and the slope is to the south. 
A little way down in the orchard we found the leaves of the water 
sprouts burning to such an extent that there could be no possible 
question concerning the cause. This season, 1911, is the first time 
that I have seen burning to any noticeable extent before the middle 
of June, but this year it is very common at this date, May 30. 
In 1910 almost every tree throughout the central portion of 
