THE PEARS OF NEW YORK 7 



on farming was voluminous. Thus, Marcus Terentius Varro (B. C. 116-28), 

 called " the most learned of the Romans," in his eightieth year wrote a 

 book on Roman agriculture for the guidance of his wife in the practice of 

 farming. Learned old Varro believed in " book farming," or science with 

 practice, of which we hear so much nowadays. He begins his treatise 

 by invoking Greek and Roman deities to aid his wife, and names fifty 

 monographs on husbandry written by Greeks, in which, he tells this early 

 farmerette, she will find all of the practical information she needs. This 

 is but one of several sources from which we learn that in the making of 

 books on agriculture there was no end in the heroic days of Greece as in 

 modern times. 



THE PEAR IN ANCIENT ROME 



Italy, by common consent, is the garden of the world, and it would 

 be strange if the pear had not been taken to this favored land with the 

 earliest tillers of orchards, or if attempts had not been made to domesticate 

 the wild pears found in the northern mountains. And so we may assume, 

 with no very definite proofs, that the pear was cultivated in ancient Rome 

 some hundreds of years before the Christian era. In Cato, the first book 

 written in Latin on agriculture, the pear is discussed, and six varieties 

 are named and described. What had this illustrious Roman, known 

 generally as a statesman and scholar, to do with pomology? 



Marcus Portius Cato (B. C. 235-150), called the elder Cato, besides 

 serving Rome in state and army, wrote a treatise on farming, fruit-growing, 

 and gardening, which, first of its kind in Latin literature, may be read with 

 greater profit than the works of most writers of our own day in agriculture. 

 Cato was preeminently the first agricultural philosopher, and no one who 

 has followed him has packed more shrewd agricultural philosophy in a 

 book than he. But it is as a pomologist that Cato concerns us most at 

 this time. Cato describes almost every method of propagating, grafting, 

 caring for, and keeping fruits known to twentieth-century fruit-growers. 

 He describes, also, many varieties of fruits, as well as of vegetables, grains, 

 and breeds of farm animals. Among Cato's fruits are six varieties of 

 pears. What is of especial interest in this history is that Cato writes as 

 if the practices of agriculture and the plants and animals he described 

 were not only established but ancient in his time. 



Varro, whose standing as a Roman writer on agriculture is noted 

 above, says nothing of varieties of pears, but gives directions for grafting 

 pear-trees, among other methods that of inarching of which he seems the 



