APPLE. 33 



Lord Bacon mentions apple scions that were grafted 

 upon the stock of a cole wort, which produced great flaggy 

 apples. This great man observes, " that grafting should 

 be done on a drier stock, as the apple upon the crab, the 

 pear upon the thorn," &c. 



Thornton says, in his History of Turkey, that " apples 

 are among the most common fruits of Wallachia, and 

 that one variety appears natural to the climate, as it bears 

 without culture a fruit called domniasca, which is perhaps 

 the finest in Europe, both for size, odour, and flavour." 



Sir William Ouseley tells us, in his account of the 

 Eastern Nations, that " in the territory of Istakhr, a kind 

 of apple grows, the half of which is sweet and the other 

 half sour." 



The wild crab is the only apple indigenous to this coun- 

 try ; and it is on this stock that most of our valuable 

 apples have been grafted and raised by the ingenuity of 

 the gardeners, who have, by sowing the seeds and study- 

 ing the soil, so improved and multiplied the varieties of 

 this most excellent fruit, that it has now become of great 

 national importance, affording an agreeable and whole- 

 some diet, in a thousand shapes, to all classes of society. 



The English name of this valuable fruit is evidently 

 derived from the Saxon word aeppel ; and from which 

 circumstance we may safely conclude that the fruit 

 was cultivated in this country under the Saxon govern- 

 ment, if not previously by the Romans. 



Maliciously barking of apple-trees, or other fruit-trees, 

 is made felony by 37th Henry VIII. c. 6. 



But it was not until the 16th year of the reign of that 

 monarch, that pippins were first introduced into England, 

 by Leonard Maschal, who, in Fuller's words, " brought 

 them from over sea," and planted them at Plumstead, in 

 Sussex, a small village on the north side of the South 

 Downs, near the Devil's Dyke. Maschal brought the 



