Fruits and Fruit-Trees, Home and Foreign

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Chapter Cfyirb. THE PEAR, THE QUINCE, THE MEDLAR, THE LOQUAT, AND OTHERS. O Spring, of hope, and love, and youth, and gladness, Wind-winged emblem brightest, best, and fairest, Whence comest thou, when, with dark winter's sadness, The tears that fade in sunny smiles thou sharest ? Shelley. HE history of...
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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Chapter Cfyirb. THE PEAR, THE QUINCE, THE MEDLAR, THE LOQUAT, AND OTHERS. O Spring, of hope, and love, and youth, and gladness, Wind-winged emblem brightest, best, and fairest, Whence comest thou, when, with dark winter's sadness, The tears that fade in sunny smiles thou sharest ? Shelley. HE history of the Pear (Pyrus communis) corresponds, in some degree, with that of the apple. The original native countries would seem to be the same, so far as regards the typical or primitive form?the district, that is to say, of the southern Caucasus and the north of Persia, extending therefrom, westwards, over all parts of temperate Europe, reaching even into the southern portions of Sweden, and somewhat doubtfully into our own island. To assert positively that it isEuropean as well as Asiatic would be somewhat bold. Many of the seemingly wild examples in Europe are probably no more than descendants of ancient cultivation; and not only so, for, as with the apple, it seems quite likely that the pear, as we have it to-day, has come of the intermarriage (in some of its varieties, at least) of three or four different ancestors. The primitive parent, the Adam of the race, may be correctly imagined, in all likelihood, from the crude forms of the Pyrus communis still to be found; but there can be little doubt that were the pedigree of the pear in its best existing form within reach, it would show the names also of the Pyrus eleagri- folia of north-eastern Asia Minor; the Pyrus Sinaica of Syria, whence this tree was conveyed to Italy contemporaneously with the Damascus (or damask) rose; and specially the Pyrus Achras of southern Russia, the beautiful species so much honoured in the country of the Don Cossacks?the tree there resorted to on all occasions of fete and festival, ...