Commercial peach-growing began in America early in the Nineteenth Century. About this time, it will be remembered, budded trees began to take the place of seedlings. Named varieties appeared as a consequence of budding and, as nurseries sprang up in the settled parts of the country, varieties multiplied at a rapid rate. After the year 1800 we read less about peaches as food for hogs and less about peach-products for assuaging the thirst for strong drink. As cities and towns built up, market demands increased and money-making began to quicken the charms of peach-growing. With the coming of extensive plantings and intensive culture in commercial orchards, new and menacing pests and other problems began to appear at every turn. Before the middle of the century, commercial peach-growing was in full swing in the Chesapeake peach-belt and in its infancy in several westward regions. Stories of great success now filled the papers, "peach kings" abounded, and, with the return of good times following the Civil War, fruit-growers indulged in a saturnalia of peach-tree planting. The rouge of speculation made the industry doubly attractive. An account of the rise of commercial peach-growing in America cannot help but be of interest and, besides, it is only by the study of the past of the industry that we can draw safe conclusions for the future.

Peach-growing on a commercial scale in the United States began in what is known as the Peninsula, consisting, technically, of the Eastern Shore of Maryland, Delaware and southern New Jersey but horticulturally, because of similitude of soil, climate and products, taking in a bit of Virginia, touching eastern Pennsylvania and running up to Long Island. All of this region, including the southern reaches of the Hudson, may be considered as one commercial territory. The peach began its undisputed supremacy among fruits in the orchards of the Peninsula as early as orchards were planted but, beginning with 1800, the industry pushed ahead with leaps and bounds so that the figures at times remind one of Alice in Wonderland when she drank from the magic bottle and immediately grew to gigantic proportions.

In 1800 an orchard of 20,000 trees was set in Anne Arundel County, Maryland, the product to be used in brandy-making.191 The last peach-grower to engage in the liquor business seems to have been a certain Mr. Bayley in Accomack County, Virginia, the tip of the Peninsula, who in 1814 planted 63,000 trees which six years later yielded fifteen gallons of brandy per 100 trees, worth $2 per gallon—not profitable unless the seed were sown in rows, as was probably the case, and the seedlings permitted to crowd rather closely.192 One of the first large orchards planted in this region to supply city peach-markets was that of a Mr. Cassidy who set an orchard of 50,000 trees in Cecil County, Maryland, about 1830.193 The product of this orchard went to market in sailboats and large wagons. The industry was not in full swing in this region until the fifties when orchards were planted all along the water courses in Cecil, Kent and Queen Anne counties, making a continuous forest of peach-trees two miles back from the rivers.194

The peach-industry in Delaware seems to have begun, according to Mr. Charles Wright,195 in 1832 at Delaware City, when a twenty-acre orchard of budded trees was set by Messrs. Reeves and Ridgeway, which by 1836 had increased to 110 acres. The receipts from this orchard in a single season were as much as $16,000, the fruit bringing in Philadelphia from $1.25 to $3 per three-peck basket. Other notable orchards of these early times mentioned by Mr. Wright are those of Major Philip Reybold and Sons who, beginning in 1835, by 1846 had 117,720 trees on 1090 acres near Delaware City from which 63,344 baskets of peaches were shipped in August, 1845; in Kent County, John Reed began planting as early as 1829 and several years later had 10,000 trees of Red Cheek Melocotons. In 1848 the peach-crop in Delaware was estimated at 5,000,000 baskets, chiefly from New Castle County. Peach-yellows, first a serious pest around Philadelphia about 1800, became epidemic in northern Delaware in 1842 and, little by little, the center of the peach-industry shifted southward from Middletown in the late sixties to Smyrna; a few years later it had reached Wyoming and in the nineties it was as far south as Bridgeville.

It is interesting to follow the ups and downs of the peach-industry in the Peninsula. Epidemics of yellows, a succession of cold winters, over-production, transportation difficulties or expense, San Jose scale, have all been factors powerful enough at various times to make or mar the fortunes of those engaged in growing peaches. Indeed, in following the history of this fruit on the Peninsula, one is forced to declare that peach-growing is gambling pure and simple. Take, for example, the building of the Delaware railroad. Peaches were scarcely planted in the interior parts of the Peninsula, away from water-ways, until the building of this road in the sixties and seventies, when the yield increased so rapidly that 4,175,500 baskets were shipped by rail in 1875, the total yield being 8,782,716 baskets196—fortunes followed the completion of the railroad only to be lost in subsequent over-production.

New Jersey, eastern Pennsylvania, and southeastern New York rather slowly followed the lead of Delaware in commercial peach-growing. New Jersey, according to census reports, reached her zenith in peach-growing in 1899 when there were 4,413,568 peach-trees in the State which produced 2,746,607 bushels of fruit giving her third rank among the states of the Union in production. Ten years later the State had dropped to fourteenth. The peach seems to have been neglected in eastern Pennsylvania as a commercial crop, possibly because a good start was never made on account of the early appearance of yellows. In southeastern New York and on Long Island, peach-growers have usually followed the fortunes of their neighbors in New Jersey who have ever grown on a much larger scale.

To show how quickly the peach gives returns and how great the return from the capital invested, the following figures, savoring a good deal of American boastfulness of dollars and cents, are illustrative:197 "The peach farms in Upper Delaware and Maryland have returned to their owners the most fabulous amounts for their investments far exceeding in profit any other staple crop that has been raised in the Middle States, and on a scale never before heard of in this or any other country. Some of the orchards containing from 1000 to 1300 acres have netted their owners from $20,000 to $30,000 annually. A peach orchard in New Castle county, Delaware, of 400 acres, netted the owner in one crop, $38,000. One in Kent county, Maryland, of some 600 acres, produced a crop paying $31,000, and the same orchard in 1879 yielded $42,000. In 1873, the Delaware Peach Growers' Association reported that there were sent from the Delaware peninsula to the northern markets of Philadelphia and New York 1,288,500 baskets of peaches, or 2577 car-loads by the railroad. Adding the quantity shipped by steamers and sailing vessels, and the amount canned, the actual quantity amounted, in the aggregate, to 2,000,000 of baskets. In 1872, the whole district, comprising the Eastern Shore of Maryland, marketed 3,500,000 baskets. The late Col. Wilkins, on Chester river, Kent county, Maryland, had 1350 acres in with peach trees, numbering 137,000, producing in bearing years from $30,000 to $40,000 annually."

Commercial peach-growing in the South is of recent development—its history is known to all pomologists of the present generation. It began in the seventies, the impetus being given by the introduction of a number of early, bright-colored, very showy peaches that could be marketed in northern cities in May and June. It took years, however, to develop means to send these peaches to market and it was not until in the nineties that the perfection of refrigerator cars and rapid transportation was such that the southern crop cut any figure in the peach-markets. The introduction of the Elberta in the seventies may be said to be another stone in the foundation of the peach-industry in the South. After Georgia became a factor in the culture of this fruit in America in the nineties, the State was followed in lesser degree, by South Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas and Texas. In most of these southern states the peach-orchard is so near the cotton-plantation—often the two are interplanted—that the owners rob Peter to pay Paul in the care of the two crops. But this is not always the case, and at its best the southern peach-orchard is the consummate flower of modern commercial peach-growing.

The peach-industry in Connecticut is a recent development, as in the South. As late as 1880 the crop was negligible in the State; in 1889, 37,295 bushels were grown; 61,775 in 1899; and 417,918 bushels in 1909. This, considering the smallness of the State and the very uneven surface of much of it, is a rather remarkable development. Winter-killing, which takes place about one winter out of four, is the chief drawback but the high prices received from nearby markets make the peach, despite the occasional off-year, a profitable crop. Connecticut peaches are characterized by large size, bright color and good quality. From Connecticut the industry has spread into Massachusetts where all conditions are essentially the same.

Peach-growing in New York has never been spectacular. Along the lower Hudson before the Civil War and again a decade after it there was a thriving peach-industry such as there was in New Jersey and Delaware. A peach-industry is first of all dependent on quick transportation—the fruit must move. This meant in early days that there must be nearby markets and water transportation—western New York had the latter but not the former. Peaches, however, were early grown, in fact, as we have seen, were cultivated by the Indians, in the lake regions of western New York. In 1828 the Domestic Horticultural Society, the third such organization in America, was organized in Geneva, having for its field ten counties in western New York.198 The Monroe County Horticultural Society was organized in 1830,199 and in 1831 the Genesee Farmer and Gardener's Journal came into existence. These institutions bore fruit, more literally bore orchards, and a taste for horticulture, which, together with the nurseries that by this time were being established in the salubrious climate and excellent soil of western New York, gave a perfection in fruit-growing long unrivalled in America and now equalled only in California.

Of the history of commercial peach-growing in western New York, it can only be said that there has been such an industry since 1800. The product of the orchards of the first quarter-century went, for most part, to the brandy-still, for the second quarter it was used at home and for local markets and from then on, since 1850, or a little before, the region has been well to the front in the peach-markets of eastern United States. Changes in the commerce of the continent have made great changes in the peach-industry in New York. In 1825 the opening of the Erie Canal made western New York the granary of eastern United States—wheat was more profitable than peaches. Twenty-five years later millions of bushels of wheat from the plains, carried through the Great Lakes and the Erie Canal to the sea, began to drive wheat out of western New York and make the peach more profitable. This is a fine illustration of the fact that transportation is often as important a factor as soil or climate in the profitable production of a crop. Until figures were taken by census enumerators, the history of the peach-industry could be written only by giving innumerable items taken at random from newspapers of the times. The present status of peach-growing in this region is to be discussed in a future chapter.

Another large commercial peach-region is to be found along the shore of Lake Erie in Ohio. The peach has been cultivated very generally in Ohio since the first settlements there more than a century ago and the industry assumed commercial importance in a dozen or more centers as early, at least, as 1867, when the assessors' returns showed a total crop for the State of 1,402,849 bushels.200 But what is now known as the peach-belt along the shores of Lake Erie is largely a growth of comparatively recent times, much of the land now covered with peach-orchards having been originally planted to vineyards. Possibly the region was at its zenith in the nineties, the plantings here contributing greatly to putting Ohio in third place at this time among the states of the Union in the production of peaches.

Michigan furnishes an interesting chapter in the history of the peach-industry. The industry was started in what is now the Michigan peach-belt by an Indian trader who planted a pit in 1775 near St. Joseph. From this tree sprang seedling orchards, one of which, near Douglas at the mouth of the Kalamazoo River, numbered 300 trees. There were no budded trees until 1834. A conjunction of several factors now gave peach-growing a tremendous impetus in the State. Chicago, growing with leaps and bounds, demanded peaches; the soil and climate of western Michigan were found to be ideal for this fruit; between the supply and demand was quick and cheap transportation by water. Shipments began in 1834 to Chicago and, as this and other western cities grew, peach-planting in Michigan progressed as probably never before in any other part of the world. In the seventies peach-yellows swept like a wave of fire over the southern portion of what is now the belt, driving the industry northward until at Traverse City the peach reached its highest northern limit in the eastern states. With better control of the yellows, peach-orchards were again planted in the southern parts of the belt and the industry continues to thrive, though with the ups and downs incident to this fruit wherever grown.

Another large peach-growing area lies in southern Illinois extending across the Mississippi into Missouri and Kansas. Westward, in Colorado, Utah, California, Oregon and Washington, are the world's newest peach-orchards, all of which have arisen to commercial importance within recent times. In southern Illinois and Missouri, however, even before the Civil War, peach-growing had assumed sufficient magnitude to be called an industry. The present standing of these later peach-areas may best be compared with that of the older regions by a tabulated report from the United States Census Reports which is herewith printed. In the fluctuating figures of this table one sees the exploitation of the peach. What other tree-crop in the whole world could show more ups and downs in the brief space of thirty years? No state holds first rank two decades in succession; in fifteen states in 1910 there were more trees not of bearing age than there were in bearing; there were more peach-trees in the United States in 1900 than in 1910; the figures most graphically attest the shifting of peach-regions; decreasing numbers represent misfortunes—most often yellows, or San Jose scale, a freeze, or overproduction; increasing numbers stand for a newly discovered advantage. By these tokens we better realize the speculative nature of peach-growing.

The capacity of species to split into types, using types in a broad sense, is, we all agree, one of the greatest assets of cultivated plants. Through diversity of types come adaptabilities to soils and climates and variety in the crop, to mention but two of the essentials of standard crop-plants. New types afford the material from which greatest progress comes in fruit-growing. In common with all fruit-growing, peach-growing has received impetus from time to time from the introduction of new and distinct types. In the middle of the Nineteenth Century, three previously unknown types of peaches, each divisible into horticultural varieties, were brought to America. All three have had important effects on the peach-industry in America.

North China peaches.—Not very distinct from the Persian peaches at the outset, its outliers running into some of the other groups as well, "North China" is now but little more than a name for a conglomerate lot of varieties grown everywhere in America except in the sub-tropic parts of the Gulf States. The North China race includes varieties characterized by fruits of large size, great beauty, tender skin and flesh, good quality and vigorous trees which bear abundantly and regularly. The group has received careful study at the Delaware Experiment Station, an account of it by G. Harold Powell having been published in the Thirteenth Annual Report from that Station in 1901. Powell prefers to call the group Chinese Cling rather than North China.

The peaches put in the North China group are so nearly akin to those in the Persian group that it is difficult to place varieties. All agree, however, in taking the European Shanghai, the American Chinese Cling, as the type-variety and, though it is probable that travelers or missionaries brought pits of some of these peaches from northern China a century or more ago, the known history of the group begins with the variety just named as the type. It is a pleasure to give Robert Fortune, the indefatigable collector of Chinese plants for the London Horticultural Society, credit for introducing these peaches into western countries. In 1844 Fortune collected a fine, large, delicious peach near Shanghai and in the autumn forwarded pits and a plant in a pot to London. The pits were sown and the seedlings produced fruit in 1852 and from among these a sort was selected and called Shanghai.201 Pits from this first collection were probably sent to France, for the name appears in the early fifties in the pomological literature of this country.

The first American reference to the Shanghai is found in 1851202 when fruits were exhibited at the Massachusetts Horticultural Society in Boston by R. Choate with the statement "peach from a tree imported from Shanghai." More definite are the facts of an importation made by Charles Downing in 1850. Early in that year Downing received potted peach-trees from the British consul at Shanghai under the names "Chinese Cling" and "Shanghai," supposed to be two sorts but proving to be identical. One of these trees was sent to Mr. Henry Lyons, Columbia, South Carolina, and this bore fruit in 1851.203 From Downing's stock the variety was quickly and widely distributed and the horticultural magazines of the time gave the new peaches wide publicity, so that, from this and other importations which were made from time to time by various persons, these peaches from northern China were universally grown in the peach-orchards of America within a quarter of a century of their introduction.

South China peaches.—Those who have read the descriptions of Chinese peaches in Chapter 1 (pages 14 to 21) recognize at once the beaked varieties of South China, especially those growing about Canton. These peaches, common enough in China and cultivated there for centuries, reached occidental countries only in the middle of the Nineteenth Century. They came to America as seeds from Dr. J. T. Devan, Canton, China, to Mr. John Caldwell, Newburg, New York,204 and were introduced into Europe probably by M. Montigny, French Consul at Shanghai, who sent seeds to the Jardin des Plantes, Paris, in 1852.205 In recent years a number of fresh importations of seeds and plants of these honey-flavored, beaked peaches have been made by the United States Department of Agriculture.

A composite picture of South China peaches shows the following characters:

Tree of medium size, upright-spreading; branches leaving the trunk at an angle of about fifty degrees and curving upward; buds quite prominent; flowers always large and very abundant, pale pink, base of petals darker pink; leaves small, long, narrow, pointed, finely serrate, conduplicate, distributed all along the limb, dark green, in fall slightly tinged with red. Fruit small, oval, yellow or white blushed with red, slightly flattened; skin adhering to the flesh; suture very deep in basin, but does not extend more than one-third the way down; apex long and recurved; flesh white or yellow; flavor a peculiar honey-sweet; stone free or cling, long-pointed, generally curved.

As yet these honey-flavored peaches are grown commercially only in the Gulf States, the notion prevailing that they cannot be grown in the North. Quite to the contrary they do exceedingly well as far north as Geneva, though undesirable because of smallness of fruit and lateness in ripening. Of the score of the descendants of the original Honey, several are in bearing on the Station grounds, Climax, Imperial, Pallas and Triana being illustrated in The Peaches of New York. All but two or three of the varieties that are put in this group originated in Florida and most of them come from the grounds of G. L. Taber, Glen Saint Mary, of that State. An excellent bulletin, No. 73, from the Florida Agricultural Experiment Station, published in 1904, by F. C. Reimer, gives a full account of these peaches.

Is the beaked character permanent? That regions in time give rise to racial strains must have occurred to all who have read the preceding pages. The peach acquires distinct varietal characters in every great geographical region in which it is grown. Possibly in no other character is the change greater than in the long, pointed, erect or recurved apex in common parlance called the beak. As a rule, the farther south the more pronounced is the beak and the more oblong is the fruit. In this respect, southern peaches, taking them as a whole, are as markedly different from New York peaches as are the long, crowned, angular-topped apples of the Pacific Northwest from the rotund fruits of the Atlantic Northeast. The four sorts of honey-flavored peaches described and illustrated in The Peaches of New York, named in the foregoing paragraph, illustrate this well, none of them being nearly so abruptly conical as specimens coming to us from the South. Peaches in China, evidently, show the same modification, for those discussed in the previous group are as markedly rotund as those in this group are conic and beaked. It is a fair inference, then, that the beaked character of the peach, counting time in generations of the tree, is permanent only in southern climates.

Peento peaches.—Another group of these Chinese peaches, not very different from the South China varieties we have just given an account of, is composed of the score or more sorts showing relationship to the variety, Peento. These may be rather indefinitely described as follows:

Tree large, vigorous, upright-spreading; branches willow-like, branching at an angle of about forty degrees; flowers large, pink, opening early, often at a low temperature and very irregularly; leaves narrow, long, finely serrated, with reniform glands; inclined to be evergreen; fruit sub-globose except in Peento which is flattened endwise; skin white and mottled with carmine, parting readily from the flesh; flesh white or yellow; flavor sweet, with a peculiar almond taste; stone occasionally flattened endwise, either free or cling. This race is adapted to sub-tropical parts of the Gulf States where it ripens from May 1st to June 1st.

The Peento, which gives name to this group, is without doubt a descendant of the flat peaches of China, common enough as we have seen. The first tree, however, came from Java to England where it was first grown by John Braddick under the name Java peach.206 William Prince,207 Flushing, Long Island, imported the variety to America some time previous to 1828 and grew it to the number of twenty trees. The peaches from Prince's importation seem to have been lost and the variety did not appear again in America until 1869 when P. J. Berckmans,208 Augusta, Georgia, brought seed from China, from one of which came the Peento. Peento peaches in America are peculiar to Florida, where all of the score or more varieties but the Peento have originated. This group of peaches has been well described by H. Harold Hume in Bulletin 62 of the Florida Experiment Station from which the description given above is an adaptation.

PEACH-PRODUCTS

The magnitude of the peach-industry in the United States is better appreciated if figures showing values are given. The value of peaches and nectarines in 1909, for the United States, was $28,781,078, an amount surpassed by only one other fruit, the apple. The highest value for a geographical division is reported for the East North-Central States, the amount being $5,173,000, followed by the South Atlantic States with $4,888,000 and the Pacific States with $4,887,000. Of individual states, California with her enormous area, over most of which the peach thrives, ranks first, the value of the crop in 1909 reaching $4,574,000; the next most important State is Georgia, $2,183,000; the third, New York, $2,014,000; these followed in order of value by Michigan, Arkansas, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Missouri, Kentucky, Alabama, Tennessee and North Carolina, each with a crop of more than $1,000,000 in value.

The peach has greater commercial value in the United States than all other stone-fruits combined, the value of the crop in 1909, as we have seen, amounting to $28,781,078 while the value of the plum was $10,299,495; of the cherry, $7,231,160; of the apricot, $2,884,119; of the almond, $712,000. The consumption of peaches is increasing year by year. Until recently the peach has been considered a fruit of luxury, but large plantations, good care, quick and safe transportation and wide distribution now provide peaches for all who can afford to eat fruit.

The profits of peach-growing are occasionally so enormous that the publication of the figures is usually followed by excessive planting, with consequent over-production and low prices, followed, in turn, by scarcity and high prices. So, too, the peach is more at the mercy of the seasons than any other standard tree-fruit and winter freezes and spring frosts ruin crops in some part of the country every year and often such disasters are widespread. These ups and downs, however, instead of decreasing, seem to stimulate the peach-trade, probably, on the part of the grower, because gambling is a universal vice; on the part of the consumer, because he better appreciates peaches when the blessing is occasionally withdrawn.

The chosen use for any choice fruit is to eat it as it comes from the tree or as prepared fresh fruit for dessert. So the peach is chiefly used the world over. Refreshing and delectable as any other fruit, it has another quality, appreciated by those who sell as well as by those who consume—it does not cloy the appetite. The insatiable longing of the great lexicographer, Johnson, for peaches is common to all lovers of this fruit. Boswell, Johnson's biographer, gives this gustatory reminiscence of his famous patron: "He would eat seven or eight large peaches of a morning before breakfast began, and treated them with proportionate attention after dinner again, yet I have heard him protest that he never had quite as much as he wished, except once, in his life." In America the greater part of the crop is, no doubt, eaten out of hand but peach-pie and peaches and cream, and peach-butter are national dishes, while marmalades, jellies, pickles, preserves and sauces are as common to this fruit as to any other. Besides the innumerable cooked products, several refreshing domestic drinks are made from the juice of peaches, as shrub and peach-wine, or it may be frozen into sherbet or ice cream. Waste peaches are used with more or less success as stock for vinegar. Peaches are canned and evaporated in the United States on an enormous scale, nearly one-half the crop being so utilized.

Canned peaches.—Canning is conservation in excelsis. It is modern compliance to the command, "Gather up the fragments that remain, that nothing be lost." Without this method of preserving crops the commercial culture of fruits and vegetables as carried on nowadays would be ruined and no fruit would suffer as would the peach, since it leads all others in quantity and value of the canned pack. The value of canned peaches in the United States in 1909 was $3,753,698 or nearly one-seventh the total value of the crop and one may roughly estimate the fruit canned at home to be half as much as that canned in the factories. The product was put up in states, named in order of value of the pack as follows: California, $3,013,203; Michigan, $175,386; Maryland, $158,839; Georgia, $156,282; New York, $141,142. These canned peaches go to every part of the world to which they can be cheaply carried and are fit for consumption any time within two or three years after being put up. The canning factory has revolutionized the peach-industry in the United States by giving its products access to the world-market.

Commercial canning is a specialist's business into which we cannot go. The processes, essentially, are the same as those used in domestic canning and consist in destroying all bacteria by heat and then hermetically sealing the product in cans. In canning factories the work is nearly all done by machinery, including peeling, pitting and cutting the fruit, soldering the cans and putting on labels. To purchase proper machinery, hire labor and manage both to secure uniformity and cheapness in the product requires large capital and keen business ability. Peaches are easy to handle in factories and the work can be done so cheaply and the product is so acceptable that the factory-canned fruit is rapidly taking the place of that which a quarter of a century ago was almost wholly put up in the kitchen. The canning industry originated, has been perfected and is now chiefly carried on in the United States and Canada, though rapidly being introduced elsewhere. The aid afforded the peach-grower in this country by the canneries has been a great stimulus and makes the possibilities of profitable production of this fruit in the future certain.

Orchard-canning on a small scale seldom proves feasible, succeeding best, if at all, in a home industry to provide a special product for a fancy or private trade. Occasionally, associations can command capital enough to compete with the large business enterprises but as a rule the peach-grower's interests are served best by the production of acceptable fruit for those who are engaged in the canning industry.

In the East, New York for example, all surplus peaches of standard varieties go to the cannery, though certain sorts have preference, but on the Pacific Coast where peaches are grown for canning, the trade demands a special type. The choice of varieties differs in different localities so that a prescription of sorts to grow for the canning trade cannot be made. Canners accept only yellow-fleshed peaches and usually prefer clingstones since these stand up better in the can. This preference is well shown in figures from California, where in 1913 only 583,800 cases, 24 cans to the case, of freestones were canned as against 1,630,255 cases of clingstones. Fashion now demands varieties red at the pit. Most cans in the great pack coming from California are labeled "Lemon Cling," but this is really now but a trade name, the old Lemon Cling, the pioneer sort in the canning trade, being little grown, a dozen or more similar but improved peaches having taken its place. The nectarine is canned in California but is not yet popular with consumers despite the fact that the product is most appetizing and very pleasing in appearance. Its smooth skin makes it one of the easiest of all fruits to can.

Evaporated peaches.—In regions distant from the markets evaporation is an even richer resource of the peach-grower than canning. Thus, in California in 1909, the value of the peaches canned was $3,013,203 while the dried product was valued at $2,333,137. The figures are greater for canned peaches, but be it remembered that the canners' profits and the cost of the cans must be deducted, whereas evaporated peaches are almost wholly a home product, the grower receiving all of the proceeds. The dried product is pure peach, almost devoid of water. Peaches may be cured as dry as a bone and as hard as wood so that the product will keep indefinitely in the temperate zone, and in this super-dried state is shipped to the tropics. The apple is evaporated in large quantities but is a by-product while the cured peach is usually a primary product—a difference worth noting, for, with the apple, the cream of the crop goes to the fresh fruit-market while the cured peach is of the same grade as the dessert and canned fruit.

The dried-peach industry thrives only in regions, as California, where the summers are sunny and rainless. The product is shipped so cheaply that peach-growers in cloudy and humid climates, as in New York, cannot use artificial heat in evaporators and compete with the cured peaches from the Pacific Slope. In times past when communities were more dependent on local resources, the farmer living almost wholly off of his farm, peaches were cured in humid America though the product, in appearance at least, was much inferior to that from regions having favorable conditions for the evaporation of fruit. New York can hardly hope to compete with California in curing peaches but two factors make it barely possible that this State might make a minor industry out of curing peaches. The factors are the enormous production of peaches in the State, over-production being frequent, and the existence of a great number of apple-evaporators which might be utilized in curing the earlier ripening peaches. It seems worth while, therefore, to go rather fully into the details of curing peaches as practiced in California with the hope that their methods may be modified for use in New York evaporators. The subjoined footnote gives the best account we are able to find of the dried-fruit industry in California and of curing peaches in particular.209

The most obvious change which takes place in curing peaches is the loss of water but several other important changes occur which even more materially alter the flavor of the product. According to C. F. Langworthy210, Chief of the Office of Home Economics, United States Department of Agriculture, the carbohydrates which make up the largest part of the solid matter of fruits undergo greatest changes. The crude fibre, too, is reduced in amount or softened. Much of the starch is changed into some form of sugar and the less soluble sugar may be reduced to a more soluble form. Some of the volatile oils and other ethereal bodies, so important in giving flavor to fruits, pass off or are modified by the curing processes. These changes insure longer keeping in the product, give it greater food value than fresh fruit, pound for pound, leaving it quite as digestible, but not as refreshing and palatable.

Peach-leather was a common dried peach-product in the old domestic epoch before the coming of railroads, steamboats and the establishment of canning and drying industries. Though not now common, peach-leather is still made in many communities in the East, more particularly in the southeastern states. The peaches are peeled, pitted and then mashed into a thin layer which is dried in the sun or an oven, the resulting product taking on the appearance of leather. Peach-leather is said to keep indefinitely, this being its chief merit.

Peach-brandy is still a commercial product of considerable importance though the amount made nowadays, as compared with that made a hundred years ago before prohibition began to be preached, is but a drop in the bucket when the number of bushels raised is considered. According to the Commissioner of Internal Revenue,211 the quantity of peach-brandy made in 1908, the last year reported, was 13,649.5 gallons, most of which came from California. Peach-brandy is made by converting the sugar of the fruit into alcohol and then distilling. The finished liquor contains about 50 per ct. alcohol. In European countries, peach-kernels are much used in flavoring a liquor called Eau de Noyau.

According to Bulletin 133, Bureau of Plant Industry, United States Department of Agriculture, valuable fixed and volatile oils can be produced from the kernel of the peach. Peach-stones are now burned as fuel by most canneries, excepting small quantities sold to nurseries for propagation. The possibility of producing oils from the kernels seems well worth looking into, since there is now an enormous waste of this part of the fruit by canneries. Oils extracted from peach-kernels may be used for the same commercial purposes as the almond oils; namely, in medicine, for soaps, cosmetics, perfumes and confections. The processes of extraction and distillation are not complex and establishments equipped with steam would have little difficulty in extracting these oils. It is said, too, that the press-cake from which the oils have been extracted makes valuable stock-foods or fertilizers owing to its high content of nitrogenous matter. It is estimated that in California alone the quantity of peach-pits obtained as a by-products of canneries amounts to 10,000 tons in a normal year; that these would yield from 600 to 1,200 tons of kernels from which 210 to 420 tons of oil could be extracted. The wholesale price of bitter-almond oil, or oils purchased under this name, for which peach-oil could be substituted, is from $3.25 to $4.75 per pound.

Pliny named several medicinal uses for the peach and from his time down the flesh, kernels, leaves, bark and blossoms have had a place in the pharmacopoeia of various countries though nowadays little used except in domestic therapeutics. All of the structures named abound in a bitter and astringent principle and most of them produce hydrocyanic acid upon maceration with water. The peach might have value in medicine for this acid were not the chemical more easily obtained elsewhere. The oils from the kernels, as we have seen, may be used in medicine. Noting the medicinal uses to which peach-products have been put by various peoples in various times we find: The leaves are pounded and boiled in vinegar for a liniment, an eye-wash, a cure for "scurf," a preventive of bald heads, and as an insecticide on the heads of children. The blossoms, treated in various ways, have been used for the same ailments and also as a febrifuge. The burned pits are also used in making lampblack for paints.

For more than two thousand years stories have been rife of the poisonous properties of peach-pits and peach-leaves. In a careful perusal of peach-literature for this period and in several languages we have not found a single case cited of fatal results to man or beast from eating the leaves or kernels of peaches. No doubt these stories arise from common knowledge that parts of the peach, as the kernels and possibly the leaves, contain prussic acid though in so minute quantities as never to be toxic in any quantity likely to be eaten by humans or animals. No doubt, too, the myth that the Persians sent the peach to the Egyptians as a deadly poison is still perpetuated.

The wood of the peach is fine-grained and takes a beautiful polish and in Europe is used somewhat in cabinet-work and toy-making. Its numerous reddish-brown veins make it a most beautiful wood but the trees seldom attain sufficient size to give the species value as a lumber-product.

The peach is attractive to the eye at all seasons. A tree or an orchard in bloom is a strikingly beautiful sight while a panorama in a peach-country in flowering-time is one of the most beautiful scenes in nature. There is a great difference in the floral beauty of varieties, some sorts having very inconspicuous flowers while others rank with our finest ornamentals when in bloom. Several types of Prunus persica are planted for beauty of flower and foliage but the fruit-producing peaches are almost never planted for landscape effect though their peculiarly sunny expression in leaf and flower, one of the best types of cheerfulness among trees, should make them useful either standing alone or in mass for ornamental planting. Those who have seen the wild wayside peaches of Kentucky or Tennessee in bloom will always think of the species as an ornamental as well as a fruit-tree.

PEACH-YELLOWS

Yellows is a disease or malignant condition, it is not known which, virulent and contagious whatever it may be, and is the possession primarily of the region north of the Ohio and Potomac and east of the Mississippi. At one time or another it has been a cause of decline of the peach-orchards in every part of the region outlined. Epidemics of yellows have wholly obliterated thriving peach-industries which in some cases covered counties. The changes wrought by yellows come so quickly and are so final, so complete and so widespread in their consequences that the disease stands alone among the troubles of plants in the extent of its influence on the crop affected. Under somewhat better control now, its havoc is less than formerly, but in the past it has outdone all other accidents combined that have happened to peaches in America, including frosts, floods, drought, insects, fungi and injuries due to man and quadrupeds. The mystery of yellows in most of its aspects makes its known history all the more significant. We lack knowledge of what it is, or whence it came, nor do we know of any cure; we know only some of the circumstances and the terrible consequences to the peach. Yellows began its siege of the peach in the very beginning of commercial peach-growing in America. Much of the history of the peach is written in the hundred-years-warfare that has ensued.

Judge Richard Peters of Philadelphia first described and gave name to peach-yellows. February 11, 1806, he read a paper "On Peach Trees" before the Philadelphia Society for Promoting Agriculture. In this paper we have the first clear account of yellows:212

"About fifty years ago, on the farm on which I now reside, my father had a large peach orchard, which yielded abundantly. Until a general catastrophe befell it plentiful crops had been for many years produced with very little attention. The trees began nearly at once to sicken, and finally perished. Whether by the wasp then undiscovered, or by some change in our climate, I know not. For forty years past I have observed the peach trees in my neighborhood to be short-lived. Farther south, in the western country, and, it seems, in some parts of New Jersey they are durable and productive as they had been formerly here. * * * The worm or grub, produced by the wasp depositing its progeny in the soft bark near the surface of the ground, is the most common destroyer. * * * When trees become sickly I grub them up. I find that sickly trees often infect those in vigor near them by some morbid effluvia. Although I have had trees twenty years old, and knew some of double that age (owing probably to the induration of the bark rendering it impervious to the wasp, and the strength acquired when they had survived early misfortunes), yet in general they do not live in tolerable health after bearing four or five crops. * * * Fifteen or sixteen years ago I lost one hundred and fifty peach trees in full bearing in the course of two summers by a disease engendered in the first season. I attribute its origin to some morbid infection in the air. * * * The disorder being generally prevalent would, among animals, have been called an epidemic. From perfect verdure the leaves turned yellow in a few days, and the bodies blackened in spots. Those distant from the point of infection gradually caught the disease. I procured young trees from a distance in high health and planted them among the least diseased. In a few weeks they became sickly, and never recovered. * * * After my general defeat and most complete overthrow, in which the worm had no agency, I recruited my peaches from distant nurseries, not venturing to take any out of those in my vicinity. I have since experienced a few instances of this malady, and have promptly, on the first symptoms appearing, removed the subjects of it, deeming their cases desperate in themselves and tending to the otherwise inevitable destruction of others."

In the last few lines of this account, Judge Peters gives the only means so far discovered to check the spread of the disease—the prompt destruction of affected trees—a striking commentary on the baffling nature of yellows when we consider what science has done, since Judge Peters wrote, toward the control of other plant-diseases. In a note of later date, page 23 of the same article, Judge Peters speaks of "the disease I call the yellows," thus giving name to a trouble that until then had been known as "decay" or "degeneracy" in the peach.

Later Judge Peters writes:213 "I am pursuing my old plan of re-instating my peach trees lost last season (1806 or 1807) by my unconquerable foe, the disease I call the yellows. I obtain them from different nurseries free from this pestiferous affection. The worm or wasp (Ægeria) I have in complete subjection. I should be perfectly disinterested in proposing that the society offer a premium for preventing the disease so fatal; for I shall never gain the reward."

And again:214 "I still think that the disease so generally fatal (more so this year than any other in my memory), called the yellows, is atmospherical. * * * Compare this account (of thrifty orchards in Delaware) with the actual state of the peach in our country, and judge whether we live in a region favorable to its growth. Mr. Heston's attempt at cultivating this tree in the Southern manner begins already to fail. His trees are evidently infected, and many are on the decline. The yellows are universally prevalent this season throughout the whole country (i. e., around Philadelphia)."

We have given but little out of much that Judge Peters wrote on yellows, his observations and experiences covering nearly a generation. We have quoted sufficiently from his accounts, however, indubitably to establish the fact that peach-yellows was rampant about Philadelphia at least as early as 1800. Smith215 puts the appearance of yellows in this region as probably some time prior to 1791. By this time there was a considerable body of scientific and practical agricultural literature in America, and we may assume, since no trouble that could possibly be identified as yellows had been described as existing elsewhere in America, though the peach-borer is frequently discussed, that the disease at this period, about 1800, was restricted to the neighborhood of Philadelphia.

We now find the yellows gradually extending into neighboring states—Delaware, New Jersey, Maryland and New York. Wm. Coxe of New Jersey who in 1807 wrote Judge Peters, "I am perfectly ignorant of the disease to which you give the name yellows," in 1817 knew it only too well as "a malady which no remedy can cure nor cultivation avert," and devotes nearly two pages in his Fruit Trees to a discussion of its nature.216 References to yellows in all of the states named by this time had become general. Our purpose to show the spread, effects, and early treatment of the disease is fully served by quoting at length from a single author—a keen observer, careful writer and the most notable horticultural and botanical authority of his time, Wm. Prince, of Flushing, Long Island.217 To Prince, by the way, we are indebted for the first reference to what is now considered the most certain symptom of yellows—premature ripening of fruit. Prince says:

"This disease, which commenced its ravages in New Jersey and Pennsylvania about the year 1797, and in New York in 1801, and has spread through several of the states, is by far more destructive to peach trees than the worm, and is evidently contagious. This disease is spread at the time when the trees are in bloom, and is disseminated by the pollen or farina blowing from the flowers of diseased trees, and impregnating the flowers of those which are healthy, and which is quickly circulated by the sap through the branches, foliage, and fruit, causing the fruit, wherever the infection extends, to ripen prematurely. That this disease is entirely distinct from the worm, is sufficiently proved by the circumstance, that peach trees which have been inoculated on plum or almond stocks, though less affected by the worm, are equally subject to the yellows—and a decisive proof of its being contagious is, that a healthy tree, inoculated from a branch of a diseased one, instead of restoring the graft to vigour and health, immediately becomes itself infected with the disease. As all efforts totally to subdue it must require a long course of time, the best method to pursue towards its eventual eradication, is to stop its progress, and prevent its farther extension—to accomplish which, the following means are recommended, which have been found particularly successful.

As soon as a tree is discovered to possess the characteristics of the disease, which is generally known by the leaves putting on a sickly yellow appearance—but of which the premature ripening of the fruit is a decisive proof—it should be marked, so as to be removed the ensuing autumn, which must be done without fail, for if left again to bloom, it would impart the disease to many others in its vicinity; care is also necessary, in its removal, to take out all the roots of the diseased tree, especially if another is to be planted in the same place, so that the roots of the tree to be planted may not come in contact with any of those of the one which was diseased.

If your neighbour has trees infected with the yellows in a quarter contiguous to yours, it will be necessary to prevail on him to remove them, that yours may not be injured by them. By being thus particular in speedily removing such trees as may be infected, the disease is prevented from extending itself to the rest of the orchard, and the residue will consequently be preserved in perfect health at the trifling loss of a few trees annually from a large orchard."

The influence of yellows on the peach-industry of the country is shown by indicating when it appeared in the various states in which peaches are grown in eastern America and by noting the effects of epidemics of the disease.

In Pennsylvania, following the first outbreak, peach-growing all but disappeared, to reappear again from time to time in new regions or in old ones following an interval of years after a plague had passed. Periods and places of epidemics are indicated by such quotation as follow: Wm. G. Warren, Centre County, reports in 1851: "A majority of the peach trees have been destroyed by the yellows."218 In the proceedings of the American Pomological Society for 1852, a Pennsylvanian reports for the State: "Peaches have done but ill with us for some years past. The yellows have swept off thousands of trees."219 In 1880 in a book on the peach, Rutter devotes many pages to yellows in Pennsylvania and speaks of "thousands of trees dead and dying from the disease in Chester and Delaware counties."220 The epidemic in the eighties seems to have been particularly severe, there being at the end of the decade but 1,146,342 bearing trees in the State which by 1900 had increased to 3,521,930 trees.

Perhaps of all states, in proportion to area planted, New Jersey has suffered most from yellows. Beginning with the epidemic mentioned by Coxe in 1817, there have been several disastrous irruptions of the disease in that State. A particularly destructive epidemic must have raged in the early forties, for in 1846 W. R. Prince, Flushing, Long Island, says:221 "Any one who visits the once splendid peach orchards in various parts of New Jersey will be struck by the desolate aspect of innumerable plantations of dead trees, with only here and there a sprig of verdure amid the mighty mass." Another writer, Colonel Edward Wilkins, says: "Fifty thousand acres in peach trees, in two counties only, had been destroyed by the yellows prior to 1850;" and in 1858, he further states that "at that time nearly the whole of the peach orchards of New Jersey had been destroyed by yellows."222 He concludes, in the same article, that "in New Jersey the peach belongs to the past." We choose as the last of the many accounts of disaster from yellows in this State two quotations from Professor P. D. Penhallow written in 1882:223

"In New Jersey, where the ravages of the disease have been more seriously felt than elsewhere, the southern counties were formerly the center of the peach industry for the entire State, but, owing to the prevalence of the yellows the peach orchards have been gradually moving northward, until at the present time the counties of Morris and Hunterdon have the largest interest involved, and the prospect is that a few more years will see even these localities deprived of the industry."

"The peach growers of New Jersey consider an orchard worth nothing after the age of nine years. At that time they root out all the trees as they would so many corn stumps, and use the land for general crops, planting a young orchard of seedlings each year to make good the loss."

Still passing northward from the first center of infection, we come to New York, where, according to Wm. Prince, in a foregoing quotation, the disease appeared as early as 1801. The son of this writer, W. R. Prince, in the continuation of the article quoted on page 121, written in 1846, says: "In this island the malady became exhausted some years since by the utter destruction of the old orchards, and the determination not to plant new ones until it became extinct. This proved most fortunate as the disease has been for years banished from Long Island, and now new orchards are springing up everywhere, and every garden is becoming readorned with the finest varieties of the Peach 'redolent with health.'" A. J. Downing,224 writing in 1849, reports: "Fifteen years ago there was scarcely a tree in the vicinity of Newburgh that was not more or less diseased with the yellows. By pursuing the course we have indicated (destruction by burning), the disease has almost disappeared." Thirty years later, Charles Downing, writing from Newburgh, states: "We have had the yellows here at intervals for over sixty years, some times continuing for five or six years and then several years free from it."

At present, 1916, peaches are freely planted along the Hudson in the region of which the Downings wrote, and, whether from following the method of A. J. Downing in burning the trees, or whether we are in one of the intervals of immunity noted by Charles Downing, peach-yellows, while present, causes but small losses. One might enlarge at length on the vagaries of yellows but we can concern ourselves only with the main facts of its history. We now follow the disease from eastern to western New York.

Looking through the records of the hundred years of peach-growing in western New York, we find little to indicate that yellows has ever been the scourge in this region that it is pictured to have been eastward and southward or even westward in Michigan. The explanation? Growers, as a rule, promptly cut out diseased trees. Here there has been less dilly-dallying and fewer hocus-pocus remedies in treating yellows. Western New York, more than other regions, has been favored in the century past by its many eminent horticulturists, several fruit-growers' societies and by farmers' publications. The result is that there is an enlightened and energetic body of peach-growers, who, instead of catching and catching at every will-o-the-wisp notion about yellows, have prevented its spread by proper orchard-sanitation. Yet the yellows is here and has been since 1824 at least. In that year David Thomas, father of J. J. Thomas, the pomological writer, planted peaches from Flushing, Long Island, on the shore of Cayuga Lake, which developed yellows with the resulting loss of every tree.225 But in 1844 John J. Thomas records: "In Western New York it is comparatively unknown, and great care should be used by cultivators that it be not introduced by importations."226 In New York the depreciation of real estate caused by yellows has not been nearly so marked as in other peach-regions because of the greater diversification of fruit-growing than in other eastern states.

This region not only has not had yellows continuously but has never had the sudden and violent invasions of the disease that have laid waste the orchards in other communities of intensive culture of this fruit. The one exception, possibly, was in the decade running from 1875 to 1885. A. M. Smith,227 writing in 1878, says that hundreds of bushels of high-colored, insipid, premature peaches were sold in western New York in 1877, that one orchard in Niagara County was destroyed by the disease and that others in the vicinity were badly affected. Charles W. Garfield, a prominent Michigan horticulturist, reported in 1880 that J. S. Woodward of Lockport, New York, had a young orchard of peaches, covering thirty acres, so badly diseased that the trees would have to be taken out before having produced a crop. Later, 1887,228 Mr. Woodward, speaking for his neighborhood, says that yellows has "nearly finished the orchards."229 To conclude as to the conditions of orchards at the close of this epidemic, we have from Col. F. D. Curtis230 the report, in 1887, that yellows had destroyed whole orchards in the western counties of New York especially in Niagara and Ontario. At this writing, 1916, yellows may almost be said to be a minor difficulty in peach-growing in western New York.

Peach-culture has been comparatively unimportant in Connecticut and Massachusetts until recent years but the toll taken by yellows has been proportionately as high as elsewhere in the hundred years of its trespassing. The history of its ravages is told in such statements as follows: "Yellows appeared in the vicinity of New Haven in 1820 and destroyed thousands of trees nearly putting an end to peach growing."231 "The yellows are destroying our peach trees."232 "Peaches are infected with yellows and are generally things of the past."233 "Cultivation of the peach is now abandoned in consequence of that scourge to that fruit known as yellows."234 The foregoing accounts apply to Connecticut but reports are much the same for Massachusetts, the following being typical: A writer in 1882 declares that yellows about Boston was unknown in 1837 but that "when it came it swept everything."235 "Thirty or forty years ago (1842-1852) peaches were grown in great abundance in this vicinity (northeast Massachusetts) but for the last twenty years have been almost abandoned."236 "In former years (said in 1854) peach trees have rarely suffered from yellows in this neighborhood (Cambridge) where now many trees are affected by it."237

Sweeping westward from New York, yellows appeared in Ohio about the middle of the Nineteenth Century, for, in 1851, an orchard of 600 trees at Saint Clairsville was said to have been destroyed by it.238 In the same year the report came from Richard County: "Our peach trees are somewhat affected by yellows."239 In the years that follow, down to the present time, the presence of yellows, its symptoms, affects and treatment are discussed in the voluminous records of agriculture in Ohio as a commonplace part in the culture of the peach though the disease seems not to have been quite so virulent nor so often epidemic in Ohio as in other prominent peach-growing states.

Nowhere has the haste and waste of yellows been more apparent than in the peach-belt of western Michigan. The history of the disease is well established in this region, the main facts being: The disease appeared about Saint Joseph and Benton Harbor, Berrien County, in the late sixties of the last century. At first spreading slowly, its movement became more rapid "until by 1877-78 it was destructively prevalent in nearly every orchard in the county."240 "The peach industry was literally swept out of Berrien County in one decade. There can be no doubt of this. From being the foremost peach county in Michigan, with an acreage more than equal to that of all other counties combined (6000 acres in 1874), it became ninth in order, and could boast of only 503 acres."241 In 1877, T. T. Lyon declares:242 "This violent and contagious disease has nearly destroyed the peach orchards at Saint Joseph." Three years later in the annual report of the State Pomological Society, Charles W. Garfield, secretary, says "there are scarcely any peach orchards left at Saint Joseph."243 The depreciation of peach-lands at this time, due to yellows, was so great as to threaten the community with bankruptcy.

Pitiful was the case of the growers in Berrien County; pitiful enough that of those in Van Buren County, next on the north, but not so bad owing to the timely and strict enforcement of a "yellows law" early passed by the State legislature. The disease seems to have become established in Van Buren County about 1870 but did not become rampant until four or five years later "when about five per cent of the trees were found diseased and were taken out."244 Then came such reports as these: "At least 5,000 trees have been destroyed by this disease the past season in this county alone."245 "That dreaded ravage of the peach-grower, yellows, has made slow but marked progress during the years in this locality."246 "If the yellows continues to spread, it will be only a question of years when peach-growing will cease on the lake shore."247 These three reports, out of many such, give the condition of the peach-orchards in western Van Buren. In the eastern part of the county, especially about Lawton where the peach is largely grown, the disease was later in appearing, cutting out was more strictly attended to, and the damage, therefore, was markedly less.

Allegan County, north of Van Buren, along the lake shore at least, suffered from yellows rather less, though nearly as badly as the region to the south. The disease was less and less virulent as the peach-belt extends northward. At Traverse City, the most northern point in the peach-belt, yellows has never been epidemic. Passing eastward, the disease appeared about Grand Rapids, the center of peach-culture in Kent County, in 1883 and in the decade that followed took from peach-growers the toll usual in western Michigan. Eastward from Kent County, however, in the several small and rather isolated cases of peach-growing yellows either has not appeared or has been an unimportant factor.

The lowest ebb in Michigan orchards from yellows was reached in the eighties after which new plantings increased remarkably, the number of bearing trees in 1889 being but 1,919,104 and in 1899, 8,104,415. The disease still persists in Michigan wherever in former times it became established. Yellows seems, however, to have lost much of its old time virulency; or, perhaps, the fact that peach-growers are more prompt and thorough in destroying diseased trees accounts for the decrease of the disease. Then, too, the Michigan peach-belt has had the bitter experience in the last decade or two, of several winter freezes which have wiped out whole orchards, discouraged many planters, and, together with the keen competition of new peach-regions, reduced the size of orchards and scattered the plantations so that, in the lessened communal intensity, yellows has less opportunity.

Going back, now, to the place of first infection and passing southward, we find that yellows, though not more virulent in Delaware than in Michigan, was much more devastating. Destruction is the only efficient method in treating yellows. The necessity of this drastic measure has been proclaimed by every authority from Judge Peters, discover of yellows, down. The strong arm of the law in many states enforces destruction. In Delaware, however, growers were more dilatory in destroying yellows-trees than elsewhere—in fact for the first half-century made little attempt so to check the disease. When the scales fell from the eyes of orchard-owners in this State the industry was already ruined. From hundreds of accounts, the ups and downs of peach-growing in Delaware as caused by yellows may be shown by a few brief statements.

The peach-industry began in Delaware about 1830 and there are few references to peach-yellows until a decade or two after that time, though Dr. John J. Black says that the disease had been known in the State "since the war of 1812."248 The yellows-sweep really began in the northern part of Delaware in New Castle County, in the early forties, when, according to John Delano, Isaac Reeves' peach-trees were dying of yellows by the score "maugre all his care, cultivation and circumspection."249 In 1846, James W. Thompson, in a splendid account of the peach-industry in Delaware, names the borer and yellows as the two devastating enemies of this fruit and speaks of the latter as a "constitutional, consumptive or marasmatic disease for which no other remedy is known or to be practiced, but extirpation and destruction."250 "By 1855 the yellows had taken possession of nearly all the orchards, and peach culture in this section was at an end."251 Yet in the same county, about Middletown, but a few miles to the south, the disease though present was not epidemic nor did it become so until twenty years later.

With the passing of the orchards in northern New Castle, the southern part of the county became the center of the industry in Delaware. Here, in the early seventies, there were from 1,000,000 to 1,750,000 trees covering from 10,000 to 17,500 acres.252 Yellows, according to numerous accounts, became virulent about 1870, was at its height in 1875, after which the progress and outcome of the epidemic is essentially the same as in the northern part of the county—the yellows-sweep was driving slowly but surely southward. Thus, in 1880, the center of the industry was in Kent County, second south of the three counties in Delaware, there being in 1879, according to the census of 1880, nearly 2,000,000 trees covering nearly 20,000 acres in this county. Yellows, present and widespread at an early date in Kent, was not alarmingly destructive until the summers of 1886 and 1887, when in the northern two-thirds of the county the disease "spread like wild fire." At this time and as late as 1890, there was little yellows in southern Kent and northern Sussex, but before the end of the century the whole State had been swept by yellows. There are no census figures for peaches until 1890 when the number of bearing trees in Delaware was 4,521,623. The toll taken by yellows, augmented by San Jose scale, is indicated by the falling off in number of trees in the next decade, at the end of which there were 2,441,650 trees and after another decade, 1909, but 1,177,402 trees.

Beginning late in the last century, however, there was a revival in peach-planting in Delaware, especially the northern part of the State, and now a new peach-industry seems well started in which, through energetic orchard-sanitation and diversified horticulture, yellows, for the present at least, is held at bay. The palmy days of fabulous prices for peaches and peach-lands, however, are past in Delaware. Here, as in other communities ravaged by yellows, the value of lands has sunk to a half or a quarter of what it would have brought a generation ago in the height of peach-culture. In some cases property, formerly valuable, has lost all value—a peach-farm will not sell at any price. The best peach-lands are seldom fit for other crops, so that in Delaware, New Jersey and Michigan the whole community, including railroads and steamboat lines, suffers to the verge of bankruptcy when yellows exterminates the orchards.

Probably in no other State in the Union is the peach more perfectly at home than in Maryland, it having held undisputed supremacy among fruits in that State for over a century and a half. Yellows, though always menacing, has not been so devastating as in Delaware to the north. Erwin F. Smith thinks that yellows has been present in the northern counties of eastern Maryland for many years—since 1844 or 1845. In his detailed account of the disease in this State253 he records but one destructive outbreak of yellows, this occurring in the summers of 1886, 1887 and 1888 in the northeastern part of the State where in two counties along the whole length of the Sassafras River it was destructively present. Smith notes that yellows, at this time, "is moving southward on the peninsula." Since Smith's account, 1888, reports from Maryland show that, while the disease is still present and is now in practically all parts of the State, either it is not now so virulent or is kept in check by extirpating diseased trees. Still, however, the great decrease in the number of peach-trees in Maryland in the last twenty years is largely due to yellows, there being 6,113,287 bearing trees in 1889, but 4,017,854 in 1899, and only 1,497,724 in 1909.

In the South, west of the Mississippi, and on the Pacific Coast, yellows does not exist or if so is not epidemic.

Would that it could be recorded, as we conclude this brief account of yellows and its plague-spots in America, that in the hundred years of conflict some headway had been made in ascertaining from whence the disease came, what its cause and what the cure. Would, too, that we could believe that the final holocaust has passed. But we cannot bandage our eyes against the facts. We are as profoundly ignorant of yellows as at the start. And, while New York at the moment is nearly free from yellows, everywhere the sinister reminders of ancient epidemics, like skeletons at a feast that are never out of sight, bid us be on our guard for new outbreaks.

But little effort has been made, as the histories of its varieties show, to breed peaches. All but a very few varieties have come from chance seedlings. Peaches were grown from seed for centuries and many types now come true when seeds are planted. After budded trees became the vogue, until Mendel's great discovery, breeding the peach consisted in selecting an occasional meritorious tree, multiplying it by budding and, if it had pronounced merit, turning it over to a nurseryman for the trade. The art progressed no further because selection was thought to be the fundamental process in improving plants and breeders preferred to work in fields where the harvests were more immediate than in tree-fruits. Now that plant-breeding centers around controlled hybridization, plants propagated vegetatively should receive quite as much attention as those grown from seed. Mendel has opened the door to intimate familiarity with some of the fundamental phenomena of hybridization, and, despite the difficult and complex literature the professionals are imposing on the art, chiefly discussions of methods and disputations about principles, the layman finds Mendelian laws easy to put in practice; and peach-breeding is certain to go forward in leaps and bounds as the irresistible fascination of the subject seizes peach-growers.

Meanwhile, as a foundation for future work, it becomes highly important to know how the varieties we have came into existence. The known histories of the many diverse kinds of peaches show that this fruit has been improved almost wholly through new varieties by chance hybridization—self-fertilized seed, selection and mutations are almost negligible factors. The following are the data: No case is recorded in The Peaches of New York of a variety known to have come from a self-fertilized seed. The seed parent is given for 214 varieties; the seed and pollen parents of 37 varieties. But 4 varieties are reported to have come from bud-mutations. Of chance seedlings, sorts from seed with neither parent known, there are 161. The origins of 1765 of the varieties described in The Peaches of New York are unknown. The total number of peaches described is 2181.