THE PEARS OF NEW YORK II 



" if you graffe your peare upon a Mulbery, you shall have red Peares." 

 Stories of promiscuous grafting abound in the old books. Another is that 

 if an apple be grafted on the pear, the fruit is a " pearmain." 



After Pliny follows a dreary and impenetrable period of 1500 years, 

 in which time but few new facts regarding the evolution of the pear come 

 to light in what is now Italy. The pear is mentioned, it is true, by many 

 Roman writers, but all copy Theophrastus, Cato, and Pliny. Dioscorides, 

 a learned Greek physician and botanist, who may be said to have been the 

 author of the first book of " applied science " in botany, was the great 

 botanical and pomological authority for the first 1600 years of the present 

 era, many editions of his book appeared and in several languages, and it 

 is he who is most often quoted by writers on fruits even until the seventeenth 

 century, but he adds nothing new on the pear, and does not even extend 

 the list of known varieties. During these 1600 years a great number of 

 voluminous commentaries on Dioscorides appeared, in several of which 

 names of new pears are mentioned, but, with the exception of one writer, 

 the descriptions are so terse that the new sorts cannot be connected with 

 older or later periods. The exception is Matthiolus (1501-1577), but since 

 the English herbalists, in their turn, largely copy Matthiolus, with valuable 

 amplifications, it is better to give space further on to them. 



Perhaps one more name should be mentioned among the Roman 

 writers. Messer Pietro de Crescenzi, an Italian born at Bolonga in 1230, 

 wrote a book on agriculture in which the chapters on fruits are especially 

 well written. For reasons to be mentioned, this book had a remarkable 

 influence on the horticulture of Europe for the next three or four centuries. 

 With the discovery of printing, nearly two centuries after the book was 

 written, Crescenzi was published in numerous editions and in several 

 languages to the great enlightenment of pomologists on the cultivation 

 of fruits, but with small additions to the knowledge of the fruits themselves. 

 Whether because the book was really the most serviceable of its kind in 

 the world for four centuries, or whether by virtue of the happy circumstance 

 of being many times printed, it had absolute supremacy over other agri- 

 cultural texts, is now too late to judge. There is good reason to suspect 

 that Crescenzi's is the precedence of circumstance, for he stole page after 

 page from Palladius, of the fourth century, who, to be sure, in his turn, 

 copied Columella and the Greeks. Most of these borrowings, however, 

 meet the requirement of being " bettered by the borrower " that separates 

 adoption from plagarism. 



