126 Fruits and Fruit- Trees. 



light in colour, and destitute of stones or seeds, are 

 received from Smyrna, in the vicinity of which town they 

 appear to have been cultivated for between two and 

 three hundred years. There is no essential difference 

 between the vine which yields them and many other 

 varieties producing small and seedless grapes. The 

 special character of seedlessness seems to be correlative 

 with the diminished size of the berry, and may have been 

 originally induced by special circumstances of soil and 

 climate, leading to partially abortive flowers. The vines 

 are planted in rows six or seven feet apart, and at 

 intervals of three or four feet, and so trained as to form 

 irregularly branching little bushes, which seldom attain 

 the height of a yard. They are grown almost exclusively 

 upon the hippurite limestone of the neighbourhood, up 

 to an elevation of about four hundred feet above the sea. 

 The harvest commences about the middle of July, and 

 occupies nearly a month in the gathering. The bunches 

 are dipped, like those of the Valentia raisins in Spain, 

 into a lye made of wood-ashes, to which has been added 

 a small quantity of oil. They are then dried upon the 

 ground, a process occupying nearly a week, after which 

 the berries are stripped or shaken from the stalks, and 

 packed in the drums in which they arrive for the shops. 

 The quantity brought to England is about ten thousand 

 tons annually. 



Another variety of the vine furnishes the inestimable 

 fruit so familiar, in the dried state, under the name of 

 Grocers' Currants, or, when we are speaking of their uses 



