24 Fruits and Fruit-Trees. 



the bees only begin to carry pollen from one flower to 

 another when men first observed them engaged upon 

 what Virgil so felicitously calls their " studies." That the 

 crab grew into a sweet and pleasant thing at a very early 

 period is shown by the ramification of the name, plainly 

 Aryan (making allowance for dialectic changes), through- 

 out the languages of the old Celtic and Northern nations, 

 in whose legends and mythology the fruit also appears 

 very generally. With our Saxon ancestors it was " aepl " 

 or "seppel." That the ancient Greeks possessed it is 

 shown by that charming picture in the Odyssey, so simple 

 and natural, where Ulysses reminds his aged father that 

 when a little boy he had given him, for his own garden, 

 "thirteen pear-trees, and ten apple-trees, and forty fig- 

 trees:" "I asked each of thee, being a child, following 

 thee through the garden, and thou didst name and tell 

 me each."* How tenderly the words recall to mind that 

 fragment of early paradise our own first little plot, where, 

 in the golden days of " lang syne," we first learned how 

 to feel and see. Truly the great poets are for all the 

 ages : " the sun of Homer shines upon us still ! " In 

 Roman literature references to apples are frequent. Yet 

 even in Pliny's time good ones would seem to have been 

 scarce in Italy, for he knew of apple-trees in villages near 

 the imperial city which were more profitable to their 

 owners than small farms. The good wrought in England 

 by the Normans has already been mentioned. It was 

 during their time that apple-culture commenced in our 



* xxiv. 336-344. 



