PLUMS RIPEX. 195 



grow larger and somewhat sweeter ; their bushes are 

 more tree-like and not so thorny as with us ; and the 

 whole plant approaches much nearer in appearance to 

 the cultivated plum. This southern variety, often dis- 

 tinguished as a separate species, but still linked to the 

 common northern blackthorn by infinitesimal gradations 

 of intermediate forms, is the wild stock from which the 

 earliest garden-plums were originally raised. Still more 

 southern in type is the ancestral cherry, which extends 

 in a doubtfully wild state as far north as Britain, though 

 here it appears rather to be a seedling straggler from 

 orchards than a truly indigenous tree. The apricot, 

 which belongs in all essential particulars to the plum 

 group, comes from still further south, being a denizen of 

 Armenia by origin, developed under the influence of the 

 great sub-tropical fruit-eaters, who feed upon it in its 

 native woodlands. Peaches differ from plums, and es- 

 pecially from the transitional apricot, only in the wrin- 

 Ided character of the stone a protection apparently 

 against the teeth of monkeys or large rodents ; and they 

 belong originally to Persia, Afghanistan, and the neigh- 

 boring regions. Their fruit represents the highest level 

 of size attained by the plum or almond group, though 

 they fall far short in girth and brilliancy of the great 

 tropical kinds produced in the regions of toucans, horn- 

 bills, cockatoos, parrots, and other large, bright-hued 

 fruit-eaters. Even in southern countries, however, there 

 are many small species, adapted to the smaller birds, 

 such as the common laurel and the Portuguese laurel, 

 both of which are true plums, with evergreen leaves to 

 suit a milder winter climate. 



Our own sloes must doubtless have branched off from 

 the common central one-seeded stone-fruit group about 

 the middle of the tertiary period. They are very closely 



