THE PEAR 155 



class by themselves and are quite without com- 

 petitors or were until the quince came under 

 the hand of the plant developer in very recent 



times. 



EARLY MIGRATIONS 



Which of the twain, pear or apple, was first 

 adopted, no one can say, but it is certain that 

 both were friends of man even in prehistoric 

 times. 



There is evidence from the ruins of remote 

 civilization of the lake dwellers of Switzerland 

 that the pear w r as known even in that day. 

 Of course it was familiar to the Greeks and 

 Romans from the earliest recorded periods of 

 history. 



Long before that it had come out of its central 

 Asian home if, as is almost certain, that was its 

 original habitat and had become thoroughly 

 domesticated about the Mediterranean. Other 

 branches of the same race had migrated eastward 

 until they found a home in China and Japan. 



And in these widely separated regions, at the 

 extremes of the largest continent, the two de- 

 scendants of the primitive stock developed, each 

 in its own way, in response to soil, climate, and 

 the diverse temperaments of the peoples, until 

 the pear of Europe was in many ways a different 

 fruit from the pear of the Far East. 



