92 MASSACHUSETTS HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



cultivation, besides Lycopersicum esculentum, and it is not 

 regarded by horticulturists as wortiiy such explicit description 

 or separation from the common type of tomatoes as either the 

 Upright or the Mikado type is. In fact, gardeners do not look 

 upon it as a distinct species at all, although it is universally 

 received by botanists, and Vilmorin even places it in the genus 

 Solanum, This is the Currant tomato, or L. pimpinelUfolmm. 



But the most remarkable feature of the evolution of the tomato, 

 to my mind, is one which appears to have escaped scientific 

 comment. It is the fact that, in America at least, the whole body 

 of garden forms is rapidly progressing or departing from the 

 original type. This original type, or something very like it, was 

 the only tomato at the opening of the century, and it was 

 essentially that which the older men of the present generation 

 knew in their boyhood. The plant was comparatively small, with 

 an erect or upright tendency of the young shoots, with foliage 

 light in color and small and either thin or much curled, the leaflets 

 tending somewhat to rounded forms, the flowers two-ranked in 

 long and sometimes forking clusters, the fruit, in the simplest 

 forms, strictly two-celled, and in the most developed forms flat on 

 the top and bottom and coiTugated or ridged on the sides. Now 

 all this is changed, and there is only an occasional variety, or the 

 persistent Cherry Tomato, which recalls the old type. At 

 present, the tomato plant is large and widely spreading, with 

 scarcely an indication of the spire-like growths of the young 

 shoots which characterized the old forms, with foliage very dark 

 green and large and the leaflets thick and flat and tending to 

 pointed and jagged forms, the flowers reduced to irregnlar clusters 

 of two to four, the fruit very many-celled, and, under the 

 influence of recent selection, regularly rounded on top and apple- 

 shaped. For nearly a century, the tomato has been steadily 

 moving forward into this new form, with all its botanical characters 

 profoundly modified ; and it holds this form as uniformly when 

 propagated from seeds as any wild species could be expected to 

 do. If, as Ilaeckel declares, a species is a succession of organisms 

 which exhibit the same form under the same environments, then 

 even the common type of tomatoes might contend for specific 

 distinction from their ancestors of a century ago. At all events, 

 we have here as profound, onward, definite, transformation as De 

 Varigny could hope to secure in the same length of time ; and if 



