I HAVE in former articles, in various horticultural publications, called attention to the tall, old, and in quality of fruit, not the best apple trees in New Jersey, damaged by causes that operate in the feebleness of age, and whose value as orchard or dooryard trees had ceased. And I wrote certain articles ridiculing the want of thrift in these matters in that State, which suffered these trees to stand. Last year I saw whole orchards dead or dying in New England, by a cause more serious than that in New Jersey. This year the blighting cause is severe, which began only two years since in the inexhaustable lands of Central New York, and is now threatening us with a similar loss. It is not a thing to be looked for with us in all the wheat region of this large State, that an apple tree should cease its healthy foliage, and a reasonable fruitage, no matter how old it may get to be; but last year, and this year also, it is quite a common sight to see trees in a decline, with stunted, yellow leaves, dead ends of small branches and occasionally large limbs dead. And, as in New Jersey and Massachusetts, the cause is not very apparent.

I see, too, that it is quite common to speak trivially of it, as in the July, 1873, number, of the monthly report of the Agricultural department, where this disease with others is not spoken of as diseases, but as " the intense cold of last winter, and in the southern sections of the country, late severe frosts and freezes in the spring." "Vast numbers of peach trees and many apple trees were killed outright." Others speak of being "killed to the ground " by the cold, not to quote others equally in error. Now we apprehend that while the frost and cold may damage the blossoms and kill them, and injure to a certain extent, the foliage of the apple; so hardy a tree is not so commonly killed in limb or " to the ground "by the effect of the winter only. And that it becomes all intelligent writers to feel that these generalizations of " hard last winter on apples and peaches, the late frost," and "hot sun of early spring, did the damage," and other like expressions, are but mere confessions of their ignorance; that knowledge must go beyond these more vague guesses, which are from immemorial barefaced assertions.

It is as true, that " the corn died because it was planted in the old of the moon " or " in the wrong sign " (when neither " the sign " nor "the moon " had the least knowledge of any corn planted on the face of the earth), as to repeat the old moon story or the everlasting sign, over the death of trees and vines, merely because "the winter killing" was the last of a series of causes, or not the great cause; this is contemptible if viewed in its proper light. It is honorable to say the winter of 1872-3, was followed in the spring of 1873, by a loss of vigor in apple trees, and in many cases by the death of the tree "to the ground," for then the writer acknowledges indirectly, that he is ignorant of the cause of death. It is correct, that a man, say Col. Live-long, died very old, but to say " he died of old age " is absolutely false, for there is no disease of that name, and not one of the human race dies, unless disease is in some form the cause of death. He is almost a fool in knowledge, who asserts such absurdities, solely as causes of death.

We say not this in the emphatic way we have just written it, to wound the feelings of any one, but as a bitter medicine to cure the evil of hastily attributing to our climate and to our winters, what does not properly belong to them. We also say it, because we shall never reach the cause of "apple-tree blight" if we are not sensible to the stupidity of such statements. "Apple tree blight" has driven the appple largely out of Europe. It is coming, and from the east, westward, is the line of moderate and not severe climacteric influences, sweeping the trees of their reliable certainty of fruitage, and in certain regions almost or quite destroying the trees. And we must attribute the cause not to winter's extremities, but justly to " oyster-shell louse," to "minute insects at the root," and such causes that undermine the health, as tubercle in the human subject poisons the whole body, and does it in a way not easily discovered, and I apprehend that the cause or causes are not yet rendered plain to us all by anybody. My own trees until last year were vigorous, they are now dying; have clouds of a minute fly rising near night from the ground over the roots. Yet I am by no means certain they are the cause of all the trouble.

It is also true, that two trees, whose roots are intertwined with those of very large vines (Isabellas) which lost their tops, which were so large as to run seventy and eighty feet, and whose stumps and roots are dying of Phylloxera, are the worst affected of all those trees. Yet, I am not sure that the dying vine roots and the dying apple trees are affected by the same insect.

Nor am I willing to admit that it is any change in soil that is the cause. Nor local causes, for so general an evil. I only mean by this article to assert that we need to have such trees carefully dug up, and the cause, be it what it may, determined, if the present apple tree loss is to be completely understood. We need professional entomologists, not only, but competent men in every department of causes, to investigate and report accurately, not by surmises.

S. J. Parker, M. D.