"4. I recollect reading in that reliable journal, Hovey's Magazine of Horticulture, some years since, a statement that the finest prize pears seen in the Parisian market, were produced by investing the growing fruits with folds of cotton or linen cloth, and daily, or oftener, moistening them with a solution of sulphate of iron. This treatment was said to result in developing the size, beauty, and quality of the fruits to a high degree, and especially to free them from parasitic blotches. "5. Four years since, Mrs. Weller Dean, of Rockport, Ohio, informed me that blight might not only be prevented in healthy pear trees, but might be successfully arrested, in many trees, after it had made considerable progress, by means of repeatedly washing the bodies of the trees with a saturated solution of sulphate of iron (copperas), at a time when the sap is in active circulation. "This was a confidential communication, with the condition annexed that I should thoroughly test the plan, and if it should prove successful, I was to publish it; and furthermore, if any merit or more substantial reward should be deemed due to any one by the public, she was to be the recipient. "This plan has yet been only imperfectly tried. Age and infirmities will probably prevent its completion by me. I will therefore report that I have tested it on a number of my partially blighted pear trees, while a greater numbers has been left to die unmedicated. Of the former, not one has yet perished, while of the latter very few survive. It has appeared, in every instance, to arrest the progress of the disease, and to impart a healthy condition to the bark wherever applied. The apparent results may have been coincidences and not the effect of the remedy. There is much false experience in horticulture and agriculture, as well as in medicine. "These views suggest the expediency of extensively applying a solution of the sulphate of iron by means of a green-house syringe or garden engine to the tops and foliage of trees, laboring under any of the diseases suspected of a cryptogamous origin. It also becomes a query whether the same agent may not be successfully employed at some period to counteract the potato disease, either by watering with it the growing plant, or washing the tubers in it in autumn, after they are dug. No injury has ever arisen to pear trees by a free use of a _saturated_ solution of copperas. "In conclusion, I would observe that the discovery of the cryptogamous origin of the many disorders of the human system is effecting important changes in their treatment. May we not hope that an extension of these discoveries to the vegetable kingdom, may result as favorably in shaping the practice in diseases of fruits and fruit trees?"