HISTORY OF THE APPLE. 35 



sweetness and its agreeable flavor." Pliny mentions 

 twenty-nine kinds of apples cultivated in Italy, about the 

 commencement of the Chistian Era.*' 



Alas ! for human vanity and apple glory ! Where are 

 now these boasted sorts, upon whose merits the immortal- 

 ity of their inventors and first grafters was to depend? 

 They have disappeared from our lists to give place to new 

 favorites, to some of which, perhaps, we are disposed to 

 award an equally high meed of praise, that will again be 

 ignored in a few fleeting years, when higher skill and 

 more scientific applications of knowledge shall have pro- 

 duced superior fruit to any of those we now prize so high- 

 ly ; and this is a consummation to which we may all look 

 forward with pleasure. 



In this country the large majority of our favorite fruits, 

 of whatever species or kind, seem to have originated by 

 accident, that is, they have been discovered in seedling or- 

 chards, or even in hedge-rows. These have no doubt, 

 however, been produced by accidental crosses of good 

 kinds, and this may occur through the intervention of in- 

 sects in any orchard of good fruit, where there may 

 chance to be some varieties that have the tendency to 

 progress. The discoveries of Linnaeus, and his doctrine 

 of the sexual characters of plants, created quite a revolu- 

 tion in botany, and no doubt attracted the attention of 

 Lord Bacon, who was a close observer of nature, for he 

 ventured to guess that there might be such a thing as 

 crossing the breeds of plants, when he says : " The com- 

 pounding or mixture of kinds in plants is not found out, 



* Phillips' Companion, p. 32. 



