84 OUR COMMON FBUITS. 



tive corps, and, being a lover of nature, spent much of his 

 leisure in the imperial nurser} r -grounds at the Luxem- 

 bourg, in the study of fruit-trees and of peaches in par- 

 ticular. Looking often very attentively at the leaves, he 

 was struck one day with the glands or little red protu- 

 berances which many of them have on the edges of their 

 petioles or on their first serrations, and which no one had 

 yet observed ; and on carefully studying their form, found 

 that some peach-trees never had any, others had them 

 always in a regular globular form, and in others again 

 they were invariably of an irregular or kidney shape. He 

 mentioned this to Messrs. Poiteau and Turpin, the learned 

 editors of the new edition of Du Hamel, who also begin- 

 ning to study them, soon found that he was quite correct 

 in his observations, and owning with shame that they who 

 had spent their lives in studying fruit-trees had never 

 noticed these glands until pointed out to them by the 

 legal amateur, acknowledged them to be an infallible 

 mode of distinguishing varieties, most valuable, as it could 

 be referred to at almost any season, and adopted there- 

 fore in all subsequent works, even in England, peaches 

 being now always divided into kinds without glands on 

 the leaves, and with globular or reniform glands. The 

 fruits, accordingly as they part from or adhere to the 

 stone, are divided into free-stones (peches) and cling- 

 stones (pavies) . The tree flowers very early in the spring, 

 and its pink rosaceous blossoms, with numerous red 

 antjiers surrounding a single pistil, even when they escape 

 the blighting east wind, which is England's vernal bane, 

 and which too often prematurely wither them, soon drop 

 oif, leaving the ovary to mature into a large fleshy drupe 

 covered with a thick velvet-like skin, and containing an 

 oval stone irregularly furrowed with numerous corruga- 

 tions, within which is a kernel strongly impregnated with 

 hydrocyanic or prussic acid. The flesh of this drupe is 

 so juicy that it is found when ripe to contain 80 per cent, 

 of water. The fruit varies in size from 14 in. in circum- 

 ference, to the dwarfs grown in France on tiny trees about 

 a foot high, which are placed in pots upon the dessert- 

 table to display their eight or 10 peaches, each about 2 in. 



