96 Fruits and Fruit- Trees. 



Dioscorides. The Romans themselves seem to have 

 been imperfectly acquainted with it, though it is to their 

 language that the name is finally traceable. What may 

 have been the repute during the middle ages is altogether 

 unknown. In England it appears to have been first seen 

 about A.D. 1524, temp. Henry VIII., whose chief gardener, 

 one Wolfe, a catholic priest, is said to have procured or 

 brought it from Italy. Rather too tender for northern 

 Europe, in Egypt and in Syria all disasters encountered 

 elsewhere are fully compensated. No place in the world 

 is more famous for its apricots than the neighbourhood of 

 Cairo. The gardens thereabouts contain, it is estimated, 

 not fewer than sixty thousand trees, standards, like the 

 apples in English orchards. The price of the fruit in the 

 markets is what in English coin would be represented 

 by a penny or three-halfpence per pound. Such of it 

 as does not get consumed while fresh is made into a 

 luscious paste, by slightly drying, then rolling the mass 

 till quite flat, incorporating almond kernels, and then 

 drying again. Damascus is almost as well provided as 

 Cairo. Here, also, a large portion of the produce is dried 

 for winter use, but chiefly after the manner of figs. The 

 stones are collected for exportation, the kernels to be 

 used in the manufacture of noyau. Bokhara seems to 

 be in no degree behind. In Dr. Lansdell's very interest- 

 ing new work upon Russian Central Asia, in which some 

 thirty-five pages are devoted to the Flora of this little- 

 known region, "the first thing that struck me," says the 

 author, "was the enormous size of the apricot-trees, 



