Parentage of the Apple. 23 



in Europe at that remote period is proved by the remains 

 of apples found in the Swiss Lake-dwellings. When we 

 talk of the native country of a cultivated plant or tree, 

 of course it means of the plant in its crude, original, 

 rudimentary condition. Garden apples are not spon- 

 taneous anywhere. All have come, in course of time, 

 from simple and primitive forms represented in our 

 English hedgerows by the Crab ; for this seems after all 

 to be only one of three or four different species of Pyrus, 

 each of which has played its own part in the origination. 

 It is convenient to call the English Crab and all our 

 cultivated apples by the collective Linnaean name of 

 Pyrus Mains. Still, however, we have to ask how much 

 of their nature and character they may have inherited from 

 the Pyrus pumila (or prcecox), the P. dasyphylla, and the 

 P. prunifolia; the " crab" of England, a tree found all over 

 Europe, receiving their various influence, just as ancient 

 families, though preserving their integrity, have been tinc- 

 tured by their marriages right and left. At what period 

 and in what country the austere crab began to disclose 

 its wonderful capacity for change to a better condition, 

 and by what circumstances the tendency to improve 

 was first aroused, there is no possibility of finding out. 

 Probably the change was contemporaneous with the 

 development of the social and constructive instincts of 

 man, pertaining to no particular spot and to no particular 

 period. Good apples no doubt arose in the earliest 

 times, as they constantly do at the present day, "by 

 accident." Nature has not two ways of working, nor did 



