14 QUINCE CULTURE. 
it extensively as a preserve. Its botanical name, Cydo- 
nia, comes from Cydon, a city on the island of Crete, 
where it grew abundantly. They found it then, as now, 
<‘both toothsome and wholesome.” A writer in the sey- 
enth volume of Putnam’s Magazine tells how the ancients 
testified to their appreciation of this fruit by dedicating 
it to Venus. They regarded it as the emblem of both 
love and happiness. With it they decorated the temples 
of Cyprus and Paphos. It was the chosen ornament of 
the statues of Hymen. In the garden of the Tuilleries 
there is a figure of Hercules holding quinces in his hand. 
According to Plutarch, Solon enacted a law that this 
fruit should be the invariable feast of each newly-wedded 
pair before they retired to their nuptial couch. Homer, 
the Asiatic Greek and father of epic poetry, three thou- 
sand years ago described a garden in his Odyssey with 
such classic beauty, and sympathy with the real life of 
the people of that age, that we almost wish we had lived in 
his Smyrnian home to regale ourselves with the luscious 
quinces and other fruits there grown in their perfection. 
From the classic plains of Greece, where it may have 
formed the sacred shade of Academus, this golden fruit, 
in genial fellowship with literature and the arts, traveled 
into Italy, where Virgil, the prince of Latin poets, threw 
over its own inherent charms the rhythmic spell of his 
enchanting lays. One of the magic effusions of his genius 
appears in the beautiful lament of the shepherd Da- 
mon, in the VIIIth KEclogue, where he honors the quince 
by placing it among the select exponents of a higher 
order of nature, hypothetically conceived to illustrate the 
irremediable determination of the lover’s despair. 
The quince was, according to Goropius, the golden apple 
of the Hesperides. Columella, the most elegant and ex- 
tensive agricultural and horticultural writer of his time, 
‘¢who scattered incense upon the altar of its virtues,” 
extolled it as the promoter of both health and pleasure. 
