"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.