312 SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS VOL.54 



its beginnings. Also before the dawn of history men had learned 

 that valued varieties of fig, olive, grape, and other fruits could not 

 be depended on to come true to seed. Seedlings of these were apt 

 to prove degenerate, as they called it; and the propagating of them 

 by layers, and especially by grafting, had been invented as the sure 

 means of preserving and perpetually reproducing choice varieties. 



They who wrote of fruit culture two thousand years ago and 

 more mention by name great numbers of varieties, not only of fig, 

 olive, and grape, but also of peaches, cherries, and other fruits ; some- 

 times favoring the reader with a few hints of the differences sub- 

 sisting between. two varieties; but I have met with nothing like 

 descriptive lists of the varieties of even such common and variable 

 fruits as figs, olives, and grapes, in the writers of antiquity; nothing 

 that was written for the purpose of enabling the reader to identify 

 the varieties. I can not discover that any one anterior to Valerius 

 Cordus, engaged in this kind of an enterprise. 



There are long chapters in Cordus' book which so read as to 

 make it certain that in the course of his botanical expeditions to 

 many parts of Germany, as well as at home, he made everywhere 

 very special studies of the different varieties of apple and pear 

 which were under cultivation in the orchards of the time, and that 

 he wrote a careful description of each on the spot, and that so full 

 that the properly qualified reader would be able to indentify the 

 different kinds by the description alone. I say the qualified reader, 

 meaning of course the educated ; for every line of Cordus' pomologic 

 writing, like all the rest of his botany, is in Latin; and a knowledge 

 of the Latin terminology of descriptive botany is essential to the 

 full understanding of him here. 



With the intention, then, of interesting the botanical fraternity 

 in this diversity of cultivated varieties, he describes as many as 

 fifty named varieties of pears, and thirty-one of apples, all of which 

 he has found in one part or another of Germany.^ The original 

 German names are always given, then the name is turned into 

 Latin as if for the convenience of the botanists, all of whom in the 

 time of Cordus, like the other educated people, find Latin the only 

 adequate medium of scientific converse. The excellency of these 

 pomologic diagnoses can more readily be seen than described, and I 

 therefore present English translations of two or three of them; and 

 since it is his practice to describe one variety partly by comparison 

 with another, I shall take up three descriptions that are consecutive. 



1 Hist. PL, vol. iii, pp. 176-182. 



