2IO COLIN CLOUT'S CALENDAR. 



vi^four in putting forth a rich crop of leaves, it has httle 

 material left for flowers or apples. The pears, however, 

 escaped with comparatively little damage : they are 

 earlier by ten or fifteen days than the apple-trees, and 

 they seem to have gained strength enough meanwhile 

 to enable them to withstand the gale better than their 

 tenderer and later neighbours. Different trees and dif- 

 ferent varieties show very different degrees of hardihood 

 in this matter ; some kinds of pear, such as the Forelle, 

 will resist frost just after flowering which kills every 

 other sort ; while comparatively few pippins or improved 

 English varieties of apple can be grown at all in the 

 latitude of Stockholm, In fact, the petty differences 

 upon which natural selection works for the ultimate pro- 

 duction of new species exist abundantly everywhere ; 

 and there is hardly any such difference, however minute, 

 that will not give one variety an advantage over another 

 in some peculiar habitat or situation. 



Fundamentally, of course, apples and pears may be 

 regarded as slightly divergent descendants of the same 

 common ancestor. Our sour little wild crabs and hedge- 

 row pears show us the two types in their earliest divergent 

 form, as yet not very widely separated from one another ; 

 for their distinctive excellences have been largely brought 

 out by cultivation, which, as in many other cases, has 

 exaggerated their differences of set purpose, so as to 

 produce two fruits in place of one. The rose family, 

 that great mother of succulent fruits, which rises in one 

 direction towards the plums and the peaches, rises in 

 another towards the pears and apples. But the mode 

 in which the fruity effect is here produced greatly differs 

 in principle from the mode in which it is produced among 



