ORIGIN OF CULTIVATED FRUITS 27 1 



The sour cherry (Prunus cerasus). The student will not fail to 

 notice the close relationship granted the plums and the cherries 

 in putting these seemingly very different fruits in the same genus. 

 This illustrates one of the troubles of the botanists, for there also 

 belong in the same goodly company the chokecherries and the 

 wild, black, and red cherries, that grow upon branching stems 

 like currants. 



While America has some of these so-called wild cherries, 

 they have never yielded to attempts at amelioration, and we are 

 dependent upon foreign species for our fruits. 



The species given above is undoubtedly a native of Asia Minor, 

 in the neighborhood of the Caspian, and its allied species, the 

 bird cherry (Primus avium), from which our white and black 

 varieties are developed, is wild in Persia and the hilly regions to 

 the west as far even as Algeria. We will not enter into the dis- 

 pute as to whether these two species are distinct, or whether the 

 former has been developed from the latter, such discussions 

 having lost much of their interest in recent days, since we have 

 learned how quickly new forms may rise from others and pre- 

 sent differences that any botanist, not knowing the history, would 

 call specific. 



Curiously enough, the cherry succeeds wonderfully as an 

 ornamental plant in Japan, where it flowers profusely but 

 rarely fruits. 



* The peach (Amygdalus persica). This delicious fruit is a 

 strange customer in our orchards. A kind of mean between a 

 bush and a tree, it yields one of the most toothsome fruits 

 known to the palate. Its strangeness consists in its relation to 

 another fruit, the nectarine, which closely resembles the peach, 

 except that instead of the downy covering, it is smooth like 

 the plum. 



The strange part of it is that peaches and nectarines often 

 grow upon the same tree ; that is, a tree or a part of a tree 

 that has always borne peaches may suddenly begin to bear nec- 

 tarines, after which it may produce either peaches or nectarines. 



