252 OUR COMMON FETJITS. 



divine, has been deposited by the all-ordering hand of 

 Nature herself. Even yet more than the orange is this 

 fruit entirely a delight of modern days, a joy with which 

 the ancients intermeddled not ; for it was guarded in a 

 Transatlantic Hesperides by dragons of the deep, far be- 

 yond the power of any classic Hercules, till the Genoese 

 ocean conqueror fought his way through all opposition, 

 and won for the denizens of the old continents all the 

 treasures of a new world, and among them this sovereign 

 glory of all fruitdom. The pine-apple is indeed now so 

 plentiful in some parts of Asia, and in Africa, even in the 

 most uncultivated places, that some have thought it must 

 have been indigenous to the tropical parts of the three 

 continents, but this idea is negatived by the fact that no 

 mention of it appears in the works of any author who 

 wrote before the discovery of America. According to 

 Beckmann,who dedicates a chapter of his History of In- 

 ventions and Discoveries to this subject, the first who 

 described and delineated the fruit was Oviedo, who, in 

 1535, was Governor of St. Domingo, and who published 

 a general history of America. This enterprising Spaniard 

 made great efforts to introduce the new dainty into Eu- 

 rope, but it could not sustain the long uncertain voyages 

 of that period : the fruit was always spoiled long before 

 arrival, and the shoots or slips of the plant also perished 

 by the way. A French monk, who had resided for some 

 time in Brazil, next described it under its Peruvian title 

 of Nanas ; and Jean de Lery, a Huguenot chaplain who 

 remarked, on its exhaling so strong a scent, resembling 

 that of strawberries, that it could be smelt when afar off 

 in the woods, and being so delicious in taste as to take 

 rank unquestionably as the best fruit of America was 

 the first to use the word Ananas, its present botanical 

 cognomen. The prefix Bromelia, given to it by Linnaeus, 

 was derived from Olaf Bromel, a Swedish naturalist, who 

 died in 1705. Transplanted from Brazil to the West 

 Indies, it was thus brought a little more within reach of 

 the longing palates of Europe, and by the middle of the 

 17th century the interesting stranger reached our shores. 

 In 1661 Evelyn records that he " saw the famous Queen 



