Secretary's Budget. 315 



country. It is supposed to have been transported from thence into 

 Greece, and after a lapse of time into Italy, where it only began to 

 be known about twenty years before the birth of Pliny, that is, 

 about seven years before the Christian era, and it appears that 

 Columella was the first to treat of its cultivation there. According 

 to Nicander, it was brought to Greece by the agency of Perseus 

 from Cephia, a locality affirmed by some to have been in Persia, by 

 others in Ethiopia, or in Chaldasa. The peach is also spoken of by 

 Theophrastus, Dioscorides, and other Greek writers. We must, 

 therefore, conclude that this fruit was well known in the East very 

 long before its introduction into Italy. Many ancient writers, 

 including Athena?us and Pliny, and more recent ones, as, for in- 

 stance, Marcellus Virgilius, in his " Commentaries on Dioscorides," 

 confound the peach with the persea, a fruit the identity of which 

 is uncertain, some supposing it to be a Coidia, others a Balanites. 

 Macrobius again confounds the peach with the persicum of Suevius, 

 which is the walnut, and with that of Cloatius, which is the 

 citron ; all fruits resembling the peach in nothing but in the name, 

 a clear proof that it cannot have been in their days by any means a 

 common fruit. 



How few were the varieties of peaches known to the ancients 

 appears from Dioscorides, who only names two, from Pliny, 

 who enumerates five, and Palladius four only, giving at the same 

 time, accurate information on the mode of cultivating them. Al- 

 though all the evidence collected by Professor Targioni tends to 

 show that the peach was, originally, brought from Persia, and lie, 

 therefore, does not consider it necessary to proceed further with 

 the investigation ; yet, no traveler whom we can rely upon, has 

 ever found it growing really wild there or anywhere else. We are 

 left in doubt whether its native stations remain yet to be discov- 

 ered, or whether its original wild type must be sought for in some 

 species of Amygdalus known to be indigenous in the East. 



It has been more than once suggested that this original parent 

 is no other than the common almond, a conjecture, founded, per- 

 haps, on the similarity in the leaves^ and in the perforations of the 

 endocarp, but rejected as absurd by those who attach even generic 

 importance to the succulence of the indehiscent pericarp. This 

 point cannot be decided witn any degree of plausibility until we 

 shall have a better knowledge of the different forms which the 

 fruits of the wild Amygdali ' may assume under various circum- 

 stances ; but we may mention, as circumstances in some degree 

 favoring the supposition, that some kind of almond is the parent 



