134 Fruits and Fruit- Trees. 



Anglo-Saxons or the Normans. The common Red 

 Currant, Ribes rubrum, grows spontaneously in rocky 

 woods, throughout central and northern Europe and 

 Russian Asia, extending to the arctic circle. It is found 

 wild also in Kamschatka and in North America, reaching 

 from Canada and Vermont to the mouth of the River 

 Mackenzie. The Black Currant, Ribes nigrum, is more 

 restricted in distribution, being rarer in western Europe, 

 though plentiful in the northern, the central, and the 

 eastern parts of the continent, and in Russian and Central 

 Asia. In many of the localities where both the red and 

 the black now seem to be aboriginal, they certainly exist 

 but as waifs of cultivation. In both species the leaves 

 are alternate, petiolate, broad, with large angular lobes 

 vine-leaves in miniature j in both, the little greenish or 

 reddish flowers are borne in small pendulous racemes. 

 The general habit of the plant is that of a deciduous 

 bush or little shrub. The longevity appears to be con- 

 siderable. 



In the wild state the Ribes rubrum presents itself 

 under several different forms, regarded by the analytical 

 school of botanists as so many distinct " species," and 

 named Ribes spicatum, Ribes petrceum, etc. The little 

 berries, even when quite ripe, are then intensely acid. 

 In gardens it varies still further, but now chiefly in the 

 colour of the fruit, as shown in the varieties called the 

 "Normandy pink;" the common "white," that beautiful 

 lucid berry, the very perfection of the piano-spherical, 

 with ten vertically curving lines, like the meridians of 



