22 Evolution in the Orchards. 
man as long as the apple has, because it has not learned to adapt 
itself so well to man’s requirements. 
The relative age of the pear and apple under civilisation is also 
determined by the fragments found in the refuse heaps of the old 
Stone Age and the Swiss Lake dwellers. In their “ kitchen mid- 
dens” not more than a handful of fragments of pears have been 
found, while apples are discovered in abundance. As an ancient 
fruit it was a very small and almost worthless affair, and occupied 
but a limited area. Pliny and the poet Horace both refer to the 
pear, and Pliny says very explicitly that it could not be eaten unless 
cooked. So that historically the pear has a meagre record, while 
the apple has a name in almost all languages, and is referred to 
by many writers as a notable fruit. 
As true dessert fruits the pears date back only to the middle of 
the last century. The apple, on the contrary, is one of the oldest 
of eatable garden productions, dating back many hundreds of 
years, not only in Europe, but in a large part of Asia. It seems 
to have been brought into Europe by the earlier Aryans in a some- 
what improved or selected state. At present we find in our 
orchards as a result of more recent selection a large number of 
special branches of the stock—varieties they cannot be called, as 
each group contains innumerable varieties, and those not species 
became established long before any pear was worthy of classifica- 
tion as a dessert fruit. The pippin got its blood so thoroughly 
fixed 200 years ago that its seedlings are distinguishable to-day all 
over the world. That is, in an orchard of seedlings, or in a wild 
thicket of apples, a good horticulturist is likely to find apples 
easily distinguished as descendants of the pippin line. ‘They may 
be quite out of direct descent, and cross-bred to many degrees, yet 
by flavour, colour, texture, shape, core, seeds, sutures, stem or 
otherwise, it is easy to determine the ancestry to be remotely pippin. 
Such family groups of pears we have, but very much less firmly 
established. When a variety of any fruit gets to be so positively 
traceable in descent we may be sure that it has been for a long 
while undergoing selective influences. Nothing is so hard to 
settle down to fixed idiosyncrasies as a sub-species. Break up a 
type and the tendency for a long while is toward infinite variation. 
Instability governs form or colour or quality, or all these and other 
characteristics. I have over 200 cross-bred varieties of beans, 
which I have produced within four years. The trouble now is to 
fix the characteristics of any one of them, and stop the further 
propensity to crossing. The apple, however, has for a long while 
had what may be called horticultural species, one of which I have 
referred to as the pippin; others are the bellefleur and gillifleur. 
The apple has been so long man’s companion and under the 
control of man that it has not only lost all recollection about thorns, 
