CHERRIES ARE RIPE. 127 



have grown into our morellos and bigaroons ; while an 

 Eastern bush has been gradually developed into our 

 more delicate apricots. The old-fashioned botanists 

 have thrust the peach and nectarine into a separate 

 genus, because of their wrinkled stones ; but common 

 sense will show any one that it would be much easier to 

 get a peach out of an apricot than to get an apricot out . 

 of a plum : and, indeed, these artificial scientific dis- 

 tinctions are fast breaking down at the present day, as 

 we learn more and more about the infinite plasticity of 

 living forms under cultivation or altered circumstances. 

 Even the almond, different as its nut appears from the 

 plum type of fruit, is really a plum by origin ; for in all 

 other particulars of flower, leaf, and habit it closely 

 resembles the nectarine, from which it has diverged 

 only in the solitary specialty of a less juicy fruit. We 

 know how little trouble it takes to turn a single white 

 may-blossom into the double pink variety, or to produce 

 our distorted flowering almonds and our big many- 

 petalled roses from the normal form : it takes very 

 little more trouble for nature to turn an apricot into 

 a peach, or to produce a dry shell-covered almond from 

 a juicy nectarine. Only, since nature acts more slowly, 

 and since her conditions remain approximately the same 

 throughout, her new species do not tend to relapse at 

 once into the parent form, as our artificial varieties 

 mostly do the moment we relax the stringent regimen 

 under which they have been produced. 



