94 OUR COMMON FRUITS. 



CHAPTER VIII. 

 THE DATE. 



EVEN after the mild breath of spring has begun to- 

 kindle a light of blossoms on our boughs, in the gradual 

 progression of our seasons, yet a long time must elapse 

 ere summer's warmer smile shall have ripened the flowers 

 into fruit : while awaiting her slow coming, we are glad 

 to avail ourselves occasionally of any fractal variety af- 

 forded by the produce of other lands, and thus the des- 

 sert can hardly fail sometimes to include a treasure from 

 the East, which introduces us to a class of vegetation al- 

 together different from our own. The fruits which have 

 been hitherto under consideration, if not all the growth 

 of our own clime, have yet at least been all the produce 

 of trees formed on the same model as those which daily 

 appeal to our most casual observation. Such trees sur- 

 round us everywhere, and if we traverse the whole land, 

 no other arboreal form appears than this one type, with 

 tapering stem, diminishing its substance as it ascends by 

 continually throwing it off to form antlered branches with 

 endless ramifications, all covered with a coat of separable 

 bark, and clothed with leaves veined with a network of 

 interwoven reticulations; for these are the distinguishing 

 characteristics of the exogens or outward growers of the 

 temperate zone, which derive this name from their con- 

 stantly developing their new wood on the outside of that 

 formed the previous year. To this class all European 

 fruit-bearing plants belong, from the lordly walnut-tree 

 to the humble gooseberry -bush, from, the creeping straw- 

 berry to the upward-climbing vine. The grasses and ce- 

 reals offer us, indeed, abundant specimens of a miniature 

 kind of endogenous growth; but it needs the ardour of a 

 tropical sky to call forth an arboreal endogen a tree 

 towering upwards to its loftiest height, unbranched, and 

 therefore unlessened in magnitude, and terminating at its 

 extremity in a fountain burst of green spray, its long 



