CHAPTER XII 



APPLE VARIETIES 



"By their fruits ye shall know them." 



— Matthew VII: 20. 



Plutarch once remarked that it was a very- 

 difficult thing to "trace and find out the truth 

 of anything by history. ' ' He would have made 

 the statement even stronger if he had lived in 

 the present time and had attempted to investi- 

 gate the history of some of our modern apples. 

 Even those sorts which belong to the aristoc- 

 racy among fruits, the pomological "upper 

 ten" have most uncertain family trees so far 

 as genealogy is concerned. 



The history of some of our best known sorts 

 is already lost and we know but little more of the 

 origin of the Ben Davis than we do of the use of 

 apples by the ancients. On the latter subject we 

 know that apples were used by the lake dwellers 

 in Switzerland before the time of written his- 

 tory. "We know this because some of those 

 amphibious Swiss were very poor housekeepers 

 and allowed a lot of trash to accumulate about 

 their premises. Modern college professors have 

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