THE PEACHES OF NEW YORK II 



HAS THE PEACH COME FROM THE ALMOND? 



In the light of evolution every plant has been preceded by another 

 and since the peach and almond have many characters in common, one 

 may have descended from the other. But as to which, if either, is the 

 parent species it would seem idle to speculate with the shreddy and patchy 

 knowledge we now possess of the descent of plants. Yet Thomas Andrew 

 Knight, the greatest horticultural authority of his time and one of the 

 leading experimenters of all time in this field of agriculture, maintained 

 that the peach is a modified almond. His theory received the support of 

 several of the leading English horticulturists of the last century and Darwin 

 gave it credence to the extent of collecting data for its substantiation. 



Knight believed that the almond and the peach constituted a single 

 species and that by selection under cultivation an almond could ulti- 

 mately be turned into a peach.^ He sought proof for his theory in 

 hybridization and on a tree raised from the seed of an almond fertilized 

 by peach-pollen produced a fruit with soft and melting flesh and in all 

 characteristics more like the peach than the almond. This experiment, 

 which in the light of our present knowledge of the laws of inheritance does 

 not in the least illuminate the hypothesis with which Knight started, 

 carried on in the medieval days of plant-breeding, convinced not only 

 Knight in his belief that the peach may be bred from the almond but 

 led others, even down to our own time, to accept the theory. 



Thus, a writer, presiunably Lindley, in The Gardener's Chronicle ^ in 

 1856 says " we are justified in the conclusion that the Almond bears about 

 the same relation to the Peach that the Crab bears to the Cultivated 

 Apple." Later, in the same article, the descent is pictured as follows: 



" I. Almond became more fleshy — • Bad clingstone. 



2. Bad clingstone became more fleshy — Good clingstone. 



3. Good clingstone became more fleshy — Our soft peaches. 



4. Soft peach sported, receding toward the original fleshy type 



and lost its wool — Nectarine." 

 Another high authority in his time, Thomas Rivers,^ in 1863, held that 

 peaches, if left to a state of nature would degenerate into thick-fleshed 

 almonds and makes the positive statement that he has " one or two seed- 

 ling peaches approaching very nearly to that state." 



' Knight Thomas Andrew Trans. Hort. Soc. Land. 3:1. 

 'Card. Chron. 531. 1856. 

 ' Card. Chron. 27. 1863. 



