10 THE PEARS OF NEW YORK 



as a medicine as well as a food, had curious notions as to their digestibility, 

 and, as with most plants, ascribed other marvelous qualities to them. 

 Thus, Pliny says: 



" All kinds of pears, as an aliment, are indigestible, to persons in 

 robust health, even; but to invalids they are forbidden as rigidly as wine. 

 Boiled, however, they are remarkably agreeable and wholesome, those of 

 the Crustumium in particular. All kinds of pears, too, boiled with honey, 

 are wholesome to the stomach. Cataplasms of a resolvent nature are made 

 with pears, and a decoction of them is used to disperse indurations. They 

 are efficacious, also, in cases of poisoning by mushrooms and fungi, as much 

 by reason of their heaviness, as by the neutralizing effects of their juice. 



" The wild pear ripens but very slowly. Cut in slices and hung in 

 the air to dry, it arrests looseness of the bowels, an effect which is equally 

 produced by a decoction of it taken in drink; in which case the leaves are 

 also boiled up together with the fruit. The ashes of pear-tree wood are 

 even more efficacious as an antidote to the poison of fungi. 



"A load of apples or pears, however small, is singularly fatiguing to 

 beasts of burden; the best plan to counteract this, they say, is to give the 

 animals some to eat, or at least to show them the fruit before starting." 



There is in the books of these old farmer-writers a mass of sagacious 

 teachings which can never be outlived will always underlay the best 

 practice. Followed carefully, except in the matter of pests, the precepts 

 of Cato and Varro would as certainly lead to success as the mandates of 

 the modern experiment stations with all the up-to-date appliances for 

 carrying out their commands. Sagacity fails, however, in one respect 

 in these Roman husbandmen all are fettered by superstitions. In 

 these old books on the arts of husbandry, woven in with the practical 

 precepts, which stand well the test of science, superstitions abound 

 beyond present belief. Thus, whenever the discourse turns to pears, from 

 Diophanes, who lived in Asia Minor a century before Christ, down through 

 the ages in Greece, Italy, France, Belgium to the eighteenth century in 

 England, runs the superstition, with various modifications, that to grow 

 the best pears you must bore a hole through the trunk at the ground and 

 drive in a plug of oak or beech over which the earth must be drawn. If 

 the wound does not heal, it must be washed for a fortnight with the lees 

 of wine. As the superstition waned, the apologetic injunction usually 

 follows, that, in any event the wine-lees will improve the flavor of the 

 fruit. Another superstition, current for centuries, accepted by Cato and 

 Varro, and handed on with abiding faith almost to modern times was, as 

 stated by Barnaby Googe, a farmer and writer subject of Queen Elizabeth, 



