COMMON PEAR-TREE. 289 
than in woods and forests. The varieties cultivated for their fruit succeed both 
in the temperate and transition zones of the two hemispheres, and it has been 
remarked that this tree, as well as the apple and the cherry, will grow in the 
open air, wherever the oak will thrive. 
The earliest writers mention the pear as growing abundantly in Syria; Egypt, 
and in Greece ; and it appears to have been brought into Italy from these places 
about the time that Sylla made himself master of the last-named country, 
although there is but little doubt that the Romans had several kinds of this fruit 
long before that time. Among the trees which Homer describes as forming the 
orchard of Laertes, the father of Ulysses, we find the pear. Theophrastus speaks 
of the productiveness of old pear-trees ; and Virgil mentions some pears which 
he received from Cato. Pliny describes the varieties in cultivation, in his time, 
as being exceedingly numerous^ and says that a fermented liquor was made of 
the expressed juice. " Both apples and pears," he says, " have the properties of 
wine, on which account the physicians are careful how they give them to their 
patients ; but when sodden in wine and water, they are esteemed as wholesome." 
Again, he observes, "All pears whatsoever are but a heavy meat, even to those 
in good health, and the sick are debarred from eating them ; and yet, if they are 
well boiled or baked, they are exceedingly pleasant, and moderately wholesome ; 
when sodden or baked with honey, they agree with the stomach." According to 
Pownell, the cultivated pear was imported into Marseilles by the Phocaean colo- 
nists, sometime during the middle ages ; and Whitaker thinks that it was intro- 
duced into Britain by the Romans, but at what period, although it is mentioned 
by all the early writers of that country, we have no account. It was the opinion 
of Mr. Loudon, that all the wild pears growing in England, originated from the 
seeds of the cultivated sorts, accidentally disseminated by birds. 
The pear-tree is of great longevity, and all writers on the subject, from 
Theophrastus to the present day, agree that, as the tree grows old, it increases 
in fruitfulness, which is indeed the case with many other trees. In corroboration 
of these views, Mr. Loudon states that, "In Nottinghamshire, at Old Baseford, 
mere is a pear-tree, of the kind known as the brown dominion, which, in 1826, 
was upwards of a century old. It is forty feet high, with a head fifty-four feet 
m diameter, and a trunk two feet three inches in diameter. From 1806 to 1826, 
the produce of this tree, on an average, was fifty pecks of pears a year. In the 
year 1823, it bore one hundred and seven pecks, each peck containing four hun- 
dred and twenty pears ; and in 1826, it produced one hundred pecks of two 
hundred and seventy-nine pears each; which, when gathered, weighed twenty 
pounds each peck ; making a total of a ton weight of pears in one year. As the 
tree grows older, the fruit becomes larger and finer ; so that it requires more than 
one hundred pears less to fill the peck now, than it did twenty-six years ago. 
The increase in the size of the fruit is doubtless, owing to the field in which the 
tree stands being frequently top-dressed with manure." 
In Duncumb's "General View of the Agriculture of the County of Hereford." 
published in 1805, there is recorded a very extraordinary tree, growing on the 
glebe land of the parish of Hom-Lacey, that more than once filled fifteen hogs- 
heads with perry in the same year. When the branches of this tree, in its origi- 
nal state, became long and heavy, their extreme ends successively fell to the 
ground, and, taking fresh root at the several parts where they touched it, each 
branch became a new tree, and in its turn, produced others in the same way, 
covering at that time nearly half of an acre of land. " Being anxious to know 
the present state of this celebrated tree," observes Mr. Loudon, " we wrote to a 
highly valued friend, residing at Hereford, respecting it, and we have been 
favoured with the following reply: I have been this morning to see the far- 
famed pear-tree. It once covered an acre of land, and would have extended 
37 
