A Family History. 219 



fruit has been immensely improved by careful selec- 

 tion. The change wrought in these two wild bushes 

 by human tillage shows, indeed, how great is the 

 extent to which any type of plant can be altered by 

 circumstances in a very short time. The apricot is 

 yet another variety of the same small group, long 

 subjected to human cultivation in the East. 



Peaches and nectarines differ from apricots mainly 

 in their stones, which are wrinkled instead of being 

 smooth ; but otherwise they do not seriously diverge 

 from the other members of the plum tribe. Indeed, 

 though botanists rank the apricot as a plum, because 

 of its smooth stone, and put the peach and nectarine 

 in a genus by themselves, because of their wrinkled 

 coating, common sense shows us at once that it would 

 be much easier to turn an apricot into a peach than to 

 turn a plum into an apricot. There is one species of 

 nectarine, however, which has undergone a very curious 

 change, and that is the almond. Different as they 

 appear at first sight, the almond must really be re- 

 garded as a very slightly altered variety of nectarine. 

 Its outer shell or husk represents the pulpy part of the 

 nectarine fruit ; and indeed, if you cut in two a young 

 unripe almond and a young unripe nectarine, you 

 will find that they resemble one another very closely. 

 But as they ripen the outer coat of the nectarine 



