Pleasant Talk About Fruits, Flowers and Farming

by Henry Ward Beecher

In an article on employing suckers of fruit-trees for stocks, which we shall copy, Dr. Kirtland says:

“The practice of grafting and budding pears upon this quality of stocks has extended a diseased action, a kind of canker among our pear orchards, that has, in some instances, been mistaken for blight, a disease that has its origin in the depredations of a minute coleopterous insect, which has been satisfactorily described in all its stages of transformation by Dr. Harris, and other Massachusetts entomologists.”

That the fire-blight is, to any considerable extent anywhere, but especially at the West, occasioned by an insect, is an idea, we believe, totally unsupported by facts. That some injury has been done by the scolytus pyri, the investigations of Mr. Lowell and Professor Peck leave no room to doubt. But we are not satisfied that, even in these cases, they were the cause of the blight, but only an accidental concomitant. Did Mr. Lowell or Professor Peck always find this beetle upon blighted trees? Was it found in every blighted limb? Did not blight occur without these insects? Has any one of New England since found the blight to proceed from the gnawings of this beetle?

Has any one found this beetle before the blight occurred at its mischievous work, or is it only after the blight is seen that the beetle is found? If the scolytus pyri has been found only after the tree is thoroughly affected, there is reason to suppose that it did not come until after the disease had prepared the way for it.

We are seriously skeptical of this alleged cause. Whatever may be true of the blight at the East, the blight in the West is unquestionably not an effect of the scolytus pyri. We have examined with the utmost pains, multitudes of trees in all soils—several of our shrewdest nurserymen have searched year by year, and we have, unfortunately, had too much opportunity and too many subjects, and yet no insect

or insect-track has been detected, except those which have attacked the tree in consequence of the blight.

To be sure, we can find bugs, black, brown, green and grey, but the mere presence of an insect is nothing, though with many, it seems enough, when a tree is blighted, if a bug is found on it, to determine the parentage of the mischief. Nor do the published accounts of insects, found on blighted trees, increase our respect for this theory. The observations seem to have been not thorough enough, and not carefully made, and the reasonings even less philosophical. Men have searched for a theory rather than for the mere facts in the case. But by far the greatest number of those who write, give no evidence of relying upon any observations which they have themselves made, but go back perpetually to the old precedents, Mr. Lowell and Professor Peck, without being at any pains to verify them, Has Dr. Kirtland ever found the scolytus pyri? Has he ever, in time of extensive blight, found it under such circumstances as to satisfy his mind that it was the real cause of fire-blight? or does he rest satisfied that blight is occasioned by an insect simply because so it is set down in good books? The canker may be mistaken for blight by those who have not been acquainted with either; but surely, no one who has ever attentively examined one real case of fire-blight, would ever mistake it for anything else, or anything else for it.

The insect theory we regard as wholly untenable except for special, local, peculiar ravages which are not properly blights. The blight is a disease of the circulation. It affects every tissue of the plant. It is not a disease from exhaustion of sap by the suction of aphides, as Dr. Mosher, of Cincinnati, supposed, for the trees have a plethora rather than scarcity of sap; it lacerates the sap-vessels, bursts the bark, flows down the branches, and dries in globules upon the trunk. On cutting the tree, if the blight is yet new, the texture of the alburnum will be found to resemble what

is called a water-core in the apple, its color is of a dirty greenish hue, soon changing by exposure to brown and black. But if the blight is old, the wood is of a dingy white, the alburnum colored like iron rust, and the bark of a brownish black. These appearances are incompatible with any idea of exhaustion by the gnawing of the scolytus pyri, or the suction of aphides, which would result in mere shrinking of parts, dryness and death. If insects have a hand in the mischief, it is by the secretion of poison, of which fact, we have never seen the trace of proof, although it has often been suggested, and is by some empyrically asserted. To our minds the insect-poison-theory is imaginary. It is entirely convenient to refer every excrescence, or shrinking of parts, every watery suffusion, wart, discoloration, crumpling leaf, wilting, etc., to poison, and still more convenient to find the insect so atomic that it cannot be found, and thus to heap the multiform sins of the orchard on the scape-goat of a hypothetical insect.

As to electricity, as no one knows anything about this elemental sprite, his out-goings or in-comings, we are like to have acted over again all the caprices of witch-times, when elves and gnomes cut up every prank imaginable, and when any prank, which was cut up, of course was performed by them. Everybody is agog about electricity. But we respectfully suggest that it is one thing to ascertain facts by cautious, guarded experiments or careful observation, and quite another to set down everything, which one does not know what else to do with, to electricity, simply because it may be so for aught that we know to the contrary. People reason somewhat in this wise; electricity performs a vast number of very mysterious operations, therefore, every operation which is mysterious is performed by electricity. We believe electricity to have something to do with it, only because it seems to have concern with every living, growing thing.