THE PEACHES OF NEW YORK 33 



de Serres, who, in his Theatre de Agriculture, pubUshed in 1604, names and 

 describes twelve kinds of peaches. While these descriptions are so incom- 

 plete as to be most tantalizing to one trying to recognize varieties, yet 

 Olivier de Serres is one of the outstanding historians of agricultiire and his 

 few paragraphs on the peach constitute a prominent landmark in the 

 history of this fruit because he names a considerable nvunber of sorts and 

 makes it plain that the peach is no longer grown as a species but that 

 varieties are receiving recognition, though, sorry to say, we cannot be svire 

 from the fragmentary description whether or not any of his kinds have come 

 down to ovu" time. 



From the beginning of the Seventeenth Century the histor>' of the 

 peach in France is common property to students of pomology. Botanists 

 and agricultmists by this time had begun to break away from Dioscorides, 

 Pliny and the other ancients of Greece and Rome ; and in France, Germany 

 and England one herbal after another was beginning to appear in nearly 

 all of which the peach received attention. Perhaps, since France plays 

 so important a part in the development of the peach, a brief recapitulation 

 from French pomological authorities following Olivier de Serres, showing 

 the increase in varieties of this fruit and bringing to mind the men who 

 have written in pomolog}'', may be of interest and profit. 



Lectier, agent of the King at Orleans, in a catalog of an orchard in his 

 charge, published a list of 27 varieties of peaches in 1628. Thirty-nine 

 years later, 1667, Merlet in his Abrege des bons fruits names 38 sorts of 

 this fruit. For the next hundred years the increase in number seems to 

 have been small, for in 1768 Duhamel du Monceau in Traite des arbres 

 fruitiers, the first great pomological work to be published, describes but 

 43 peaches. This century, however, was one in which peach-culture 

 increased enormously throughout France. At the beginning of the period 

 peaches began to be grown in the shelter of walls — a method the results 

 of which greatly increased the culture of this fruit. Calvel, in 1805, names 

 60 varieties; Louis Noisette, 1839, lists 60 sorts; Andre Leroy, 1852, names 

 but 41 varieties, but in an edition of the same work in 1865, describes 148 

 peaches; lastly, O. Thomas in Guide pratique (1876) publishes a list of 

 355 peaches. 



The peach in Belgium, Holland, Germany and Spain. — In the search 



for prominent events in the development of the peach, we are absolved from 



the task of tracing in detail the history of this fruit in the cotmtries named 



in the heading of this paragraph. These nations have furnished no land- 



3 



