The Fruit- Farm and the Young Folks 215 



t 



IV Cervantes? Shakespeare? Newton? Washington? 



IB And the Hst may be extended through the ages. 



II The trees of to-day are sprung from the trees of 



IB ages past — that is, the trees of the wild. When we 

 turn to the trees of cultivation we find not one 

 variety which comes to us unchanged from the time 

 of the Caesars, or even of Shakespeare. Parton, 

 in his life of Franklin, written in the middle of 

 the nineteenth century, remarking on discoveries, 

 inventions, and improvements which would most 

 interest Franklin, mentions "the improved straw- 

 berry.'* Shakespeare mentions strawberries; they 

 were a common fruit in the days of Horace; 

 Lucullus, before him, served them frozen at his 

 feasts. Doubtless as a little boy Adam went 

 strawberrying, but he did not pick Brandywines, 

 Parkers, Earles, or Marshalls. Indeed, I suspect 

 that the Garden of Eden, in his day, produced 

 small, sweet, wild strawberries, like those that 

 grow under the hedge and among the shading 

 hollyhocks by the arbor. Possibly the original 

 strawberry was only a small, hard, sour bunch of 

 seeds. Forgotten Burbanks have added the lus- 

 cious, juicy pulp and cast out the seeds. Yet 

 despite all the cataclysms of the ages strawberries 

 were and are. But the survivals we know are 

 not of the Adam variety, but masses of scarlet 

 pulp of our making. Man has made the straw- 

 berry, the peach, the apple, the cherry, the prune, 

 I the grape, the pear, the plum, the berry which we 

 know. Cross-fertilization and breeding assemble 

 I 



