252 ENGLISH BOTANY. 
bescent beneath on the veins and margins, but at length glabrous 
and shining, very finely serrate, with the serratures commonly 
blunt. Flowers rather few, entirely white, 1 to 1} inch across. 
Upper part of pedicels, calyx-tube, and segments woolly. Fruit 
tapering towards the base, 1 to 2 inches long. 
Sus-Srecies I11.—Pyrus Achras. “ Giéirt.”(?), Boreau. 
Prate CCCCLXXXVIII. (separate flower and fruit). 
Boreau, F\. du Centre de la Fr. ed. iii. Vol. IL. p. 235. 
Branches more or less spiny. Leaves oval or roundish-oval, 
acute or abruptly acuminated, greyish flocculent when young, on 
both sides, and remaining slightly pubescent beneath when mature. 
Styles about as long as the stamens. Fruit globular-pyriform, 
rounded at the base. 
In woods, thickets, and hedges. Apparently much more rare 
than P. Pyraster. The unpublished figure among the drawings 
for English botany in the British Museum is from an Hssex 
specimen, but it is not unlikely to have been overlooked in other 
places. P. Pyraster also occurs in Essex, from whence it has been 
sent me by Mr. Varenne. 
England. Tree. Late Spring. 
This has the leaves more downy than P. Pyraster and never 
becoming completely glabrous beneath. The pedicels and calyx- 
tube are more woolly, and the fruit sub-globular, about 1 inch long. 
Wallroth reverses the names Pyraster and Achras, as applied to 
the two forms of wild pears by Professor Boreau. 
Wild Pear. 
French, Poirier Commun. German, Gemeiner Birnbaum. 
The fruit of the Pear in a wild state is scarcely eatable, being very harsh and acrid, 
and very small, The trees attain a very great age. M. Bose says that he has seen 
trees that were considered to be four hundred years old ; and Mr. Knight observes : 
“The period at which the Teinton squash pear first sprang from seed cannot now be 
at all ascertained, but I suspect that it existed as early as the sixteenth century, aud 
the identical trees which supplied the inhabitants of Herefordshire in the seventeenth 
century with liquor are likely to do the same good to those of the nineteenth. The Pear 
is mentioned by the earliest writers as common in Syria, Egypt, and Greece, from which 
country it appears to have been brought into Italy. Theophrastus speaks of the pro- 
ductiveness of some old Pear-trees, and Virgil mentions some Pears he received from 
Cato. The earliest notice of the Pear-tree extant is probably that of Homer, who, in 
the description he gives of the’ meeting between Laertes and Ulysses, mentions it as 
one of the trees growing in the garden of the old king. The Romans cultivated thirty- 
six sorts. Possibly they introduced it into our island, and our Pear-trees may only be 
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