COMMON PEAR-TREE. 289 



than ill woods and forests. The varieties cuUivated for their fruit succeed both 

 in the temperate and transition zones of the two hemispheres, and it has been 

 remarked that this tree, as well as the apple and the cherry, v/ill grow in the 

 open air, wherever the oak will thrive. 



The earliest writers mention the pear as growing abundantly in Syria, Egypt, 

 and in Greece; and it appears to have been brought into Italy from these places 

 about the time that Sylla made himself master of the last-named country, 

 although there is but little doubt that the Romans had several kinds of this fruit 

 long before that time. Among the trees which Homer describes as forming the 

 orchard of Laertes, the father of Ulysses, we find the pear. Theophrastus speaks 

 of the productiveness of old pear-trees ; and Virgil mentions some pears which 

 he received from Cato. Pliny describes the varieties in cultivation, in his time, 

 as being exceedingly numerous, and says that a fermented liquor was made of 

 the expressed juice. " Both apples and pears," he says, " have the properties of 

 wine, on which account the physicians are careful how they give them to their 

 patients; but when sodden in wine and water, they are esteemed as wholesome." 

 Again, he observes, "All pears whatsoever are but a heavy meat, even to those 

 in good health, and the sick are debarred from eating them ; and yet, if they are 

 well boiled or baked, they are exceedingly pleasant, and moderately wholesome ; 

 when sodden or baked with honey, they agree with the stomach." According to 

 Pownell, the cultivated pear was imported into Marseilles by the Phocajan colo- 

 nists, sometime during the middle ages ; and Whitaker thinks that it was intro- 

 duced into Britain by the Romans, but at what period, although it is mentioned 

 by all the early writers of that country, we have no account. It was the opinion 

 of Mr. Loudon, that all the wild pears growing in England, originated from the 

 seeds of the cultivated sorts, accidentally disseminated by birds. 



The pear-tree is of great longevity, and all writers on the subject, from 

 Theophrastus to the present day, agree that, as the tree grows old, it increases 

 in fruitfulness, which is indeed the case with many other trees. In corroboration 

 of these views, Mr. Loudon states that; ' In Nottmghamshire, at Old Baseford, 

 ihere is a pear-tree, of the kind known as the brown dominion, which, in 1826, 

 was upwards of a century old. It is forty feet high, with a head fifty-four feet 

 rn diameter, and a trunk two feet three inches in diameter. From 1806 to 1826, 

 (he produce of this tree, on an average, was fifty pecks of pears a year. In the 

 year 1823, it bore one hundred and seven pecks, each peck containing four hun- 

 dred and twenty pears ; and in 1826, it produced one hundred pecks of two 

 hundred and seventy-nine pears each; which, when gathered, weighed twenty 

 pounds each peck; making a total of a ton weight of pears in one year. As the 

 tree grows older, the fruit becomes larger and finer: so that it requires more than 

 one hundred pears less to fill the peck now, than it did twenty-six years ago. 

 The increase in the size of the fruit is doubtless, owing to the field in which the 

 tree stands being frequently top-dressed with manure." 



In Duncumb's " General View of the Agriculture of the County of Hereford," 

 published in 1805, there is recorded a very extraordinary tree, growing on the 

 glebe land of the parish of Hom-Lacey, that more than once filled fifteen hogs- 

 heads with perry in the same year. When the branches of this tree, in its origi- 

 nal state, became long and heavy, their extreme ends successively fell to the 

 ground, and, taking fresh root at the several parts where they touched it, each 

 branch became a new tree, and in its turn, produced others in the same way, 

 covering at that time nearly half of an acre of land. '' Bcmg anxious to know 

 the present state of this celebrated tree," observes Mr. Loudon, "we wrote to a 

 highly valued friend, residing at Hereford, respecting it, and we have been 

 favoured with the following reply : I have been this morning to see the far- 

 famed pear-tree. It once covered an acre of land, and would have extended 

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