204. ORIGIN OF CULTIVATED PLANTS. 



California.^ Thus its area extends round the north pole, 

 except in Eastern Siberia and the basin of the river 

 Amur, since the species is not mentioned by Maximowicz 

 in his Primlike Fierce Amurensis. In America its area 

 is extended along the highlands of Mexico ; for Fragaria 

 mexicana, cultivated in the Jardin des Plantes, and 

 examined by Gay, is F. vesca. It also grows round 

 Quito, according to the same botanist, who is an authority 

 on this question.^ 



The Greeks and Romans did not cultivate the straw- 

 berry. Its cultivation was probably introduced in the 

 tifteenth or sixteenth century, Champier, in the six- 

 teenth century, sj^eaks of it as a novelty in the no)-th 

 of France,^ but it already existed in the south, and in 

 England.* 



Transported into gardens in the colonies, the straw- 

 berry has become natui-alized in a few cool localities far 

 from dwellings. This is the case in Jamaica,^ in Mauritius,*^ 

 and in Bourbon, where some plants had been placed b}' 

 Commerson on the table-land known as the Kaffirs' 

 Plain. Bory Saint-Vincent relates that in 1801 he 

 found districts quite red with strawberries, and that it 

 was impossible to cross them without staining the feet 

 led with the juice, mixed with volcanic dust.' It is 

 ])robable that similar cases of naturalization may be seen 

 in Tasmania and New Zealand. 



The genus Fragaria has been studied with more care 

 than many others, by Duchesne (fils), the Comte dt- 

 Lambertye, Jacques Gay, and especially by Madame Eliza 

 Vilmorin, whose faculty of observation was worthy of 

 the name she bore. A summary of their works, with 

 excellent coloured plates, is published in the Jardin 



A. Gray, Bot. Calif., i. p. 176. 



J. Gay, ia Decaisne, Jardin Fruitier du Museum, Fraisier, p. 30. 

 8 Le Grand d'Aussy, Hist, de la Vie Privde des Fmnfdis, i. pp. 233 

 and 3. 



* Olivier de Serres, Theatre d'Agric., p. 511 ; Gerard, from Phillips, 

 Pomarium Britannicum, p. 331-. 



* Purdie, in Hooker's London Journal of Botany, 1844, p. 515. 

 " Bojer, Hortus Mauritianns, p. 121. 



^ Bory Saint-Viucent, Comptes Rendus de VAcad. des. Sc. Nat., 183G, 

 sem, ii. p. 109. 



