Occasionally one sees in the State orchards in which the top is sheared to a level plane. This shearing follows a fashion, now happily going out, as it cannot come from any well-thought-out design. It takes but a moment's study of the sheared tree to see the faults of the method. Strong shoots are cut back too much, weak ones not enough; superfluous shoots are not removed but, to the contrary, multiplied as in shearing a hedge. Heading-in some or all of the shoots may be very necessary but shearing to a line--never. Summer-pruning is not practiced in New York peach-orchards. No doubt every grower, however, as he goes about among his trees in the growing season cuts back a branch outstripping its neighbors, removes an occasional unruly member or one out of place, pinches here and rubs there, better to train his trees to the ideal he has in mind. Certainly no harm is done by such summer-pruning when the trees are strong and vigorous. This record of pruning practices in New York cannot be closed without stating that there are growers who do not prune--not only through neglect but as a matter of principle. Chiefly, these are men more accustomed to the other tree-fruits--most of which make a fair showing without pruning--than to the peach. The peach can go a few years unpruned without becoming an abnormal orchard-specimen but left to itself to the prime of life without the reinvigorating and form-giving knife a peach-orchard becomes a woeful spectacle. The limbs crowd, choke and kill each other, except the strongest or those most fortunately placed, which push aloft, bearing at their extremities sparse-foliaged, parasol-like canopies of jaundiced foliage which furnish no protection from the blaze of the sun to the bare, bark-burned, gum-covered trunk and branches. The tree-tops are populous with dead and dying twigs and do not furnish sufficient nutriment for the normal development of fruit or tree. These unpruned peach-orchards, come to old age, are the saddest sights of the country. After the first few crops, when the flush of vigor has passed, they cannot be profitable and it would seem the sooner the axe lays them low the better for the owner. Not to prune the peach is consummate neglect.