12. Cankers, of all other diseases the most pernicious, corroding and eating to the heart, and difficult to cure, whether (caused by some stroak, or galling, or by hot and burning land) are to be cut out to the quick, the scars emplastred with tar mingled with oyl, and over that, a thin spreading of loam; or else with clay and horse-dung; but best with hogs-dung alone, bound to it in a rag; or by laying wood-ashes, nettles, or fern to the roots, &c. You will know if the cure be effected, by the colour of the wounds growing fresh and green, and not reddish: But if the gangreen be within, it must be cured by nitrous, sulphureous and drying applications, and by no means, by any thing of an unctious nature, which is exitial to trees: Tar, as was said, only excepted, which I have experimentally known to preserve trees from the envenom’d teeth of goats, and other injuries; the entire stem smear’d over, without the least prejudice, to my no small admiration: But for over-hot and torrid land, you must sadden the mould about the root with pond-mud, and neats-dung; and by graffing fruit trees on stocks rais’d in the same mould, as being more homogeneous. 13. Hollowness, is contracted, when by reason of the ignorant, or careless lopping of a tree, the wet is suffer’d to fall perpendicularly upon a part, especially the head, or any other part or arms, in which the rain getting in, is conducted to the very heart of the stem and body of the tree, which it soon rots: In this case, if there be sufficient sound wood, cut it to the quick, and close to the body cap the hollow part with a tarpaulin, or fill it with good stiff loam, horse-dung and fine hay mingled, or with well-temper’d mortar, covering it with a piece of tarpaulin: This is one of the worst of evils, and to which the elm is most obnoxious. Old broken boughs, if very great, are to be cut off at some distance from the body, but the smaller, close. 14. Hornets and wasps, &c. by breeding in the hollowness of trees, not only infect them, but will peel them round to the very timber, as if cattle had unbark’d them, as I observed in some goodly ashes at Casioberry (near the garden of that late noble Lord, and lover of planting, the Earl of Essex), and are therefore to be destroy’d, by stopping up their entrances with tar and goose-dung, or by conveying the fumes of brimstome into their cells: _Cantharides_ attack the ash above all other bobs of the betle kind: Chafers, &c. are to be shaken down and crush’d, and when they come in armies, (as sometimes in extraordinary droughts) they are to be driven away or destroy’d with smoaks; which also kills gnats and flies of all sorts: Note, that the rose-bug never, or very seldom, attacks any other tree, whilst that sweet bush is in flower: Whole fields have been freed from worms by the reek and smoak of ox-dung wrapt in mungy straw, well soak’d with strong lie.