304 pltny's natural history. [Book XV. 



hard and firm by being first put in boiling 27 sea-water, and 

 then left to dry for three days in the sun, care being taken that 

 the dews of the night do not touch them ; after which they 

 are hung up, and when wanted for use, washed with fresh 

 water. M. Varro 28 recommends that they should be kept in 

 large vessels filled with sand : if they are not ripe, he says 

 that they should be put in pots with the bottom broken out, 

 and then buried 29 in the earth, all access to the air being care- 

 fully shut, and care being first taken to cover the stalk with 

 pitch. By this mode of treatment, he assures us, they will 

 attain a larger size than they would if left to ripen on the tree. 

 As for the other kinds of pomes, he says that they should be 

 wrapped up separately in fig-leaves, the windfalls being care- 

 fully excluded, and then stored in baskets of osier, or else 

 covered over with potters' earth. 



Pears are kept in earthen vessels pitched inside ; when 

 filled, the vessels are reversed and then buried in pits. The 

 Tarentine pear, Varro says, is gathered very late, while the 

 Anician keeps very well in raisin wine. Sorb apples, too, are 

 similarly kept in holes in the ground, the vessel being turned 

 upside down, and a layer of plaster placed on the lid: it should be 

 buried two feet deep, in a sunny spot; sorbs 30 are also hung, like 

 grapes, in the inside of large vessels, together with the branches. 



Some of the more recent authors are found to pay a more 

 scrupulous degree of attention to these various particulars, and 

 recommend that the gathering of grapes or pomes, which are 

 intended for keeping, should take place while the moon is on 

 the wane, 31 after the third hour of the day, and while the 

 weather is clear, or dry winds prevail. In a similar manner, 

 the selection, they say, ought to be made from a dry spot, and 

 the fruit should be plucked before it is fully ripe, a moment 

 being chosen while the moon is below the horizon. Grapes, 

 they say, should be selected that have a strong, hard mallet- 

 stalk, and after the decayed berries have been carefully re- 

 moved with a pair of scissors, they should be hung up inside of 



• 27 As Fee remarks, the fruit, if treated thus, would soon lose all the 

 properties for which it is valued. 



28 De Re Rust. B. i. c. 59. 



29 A faulty proceeding, however dry it may he. 



30 This fruit, Fee remarks, keeps but indifferently, and soon hecomes 

 soft, vinous, and acid. 



31 An absurd superstition. 



