@he Meientific Cuognirer. 
FEBRUARY, 1888. 
Evolution in the Orchards.* 
he Ih, J Je 
HAVE my family around me in my cottage, and we are a 
number of rather decided individualities, each one with pecu- 
liar features and tastes ; but in my orchard there is a family 
of about the same age that is decidedly more positive and 
peculiar in its idiosyncrasies. The great rose family includes 
not only the rose and the briars, but the apples and the pears, and 
plums and cherries. Of these the apples and pears are generally 
associated in the orchard and are most closely related. Yet they 
must have come off from the parent stock at very different periods. 
I mean that the old rose ancestor had children that were apple- 
like and apple progenitors before it had pear-like children that 
were progenitors of the pear. The apple has certainly a much 
longer history than the pear, and has been much longer under- 
going a civilising process. You can see this in the fact that the 
pear reverts to thorn-producing very uniformly, while an apple is 
rarely found that has a trace of this primitive characteristic of the 
whole family. For at the outset not only rose-bushes were thorny, 
and blackberries and raspberries thorny, but apples, pears, and all 
the rest of the cousins. The reason that some of them are not 
thorny to-day is that they have for a longer time been in posses- 
sion of man, and not needing thorns have learned to leave them 
off. It is decidedly for the advantage of any bush or tree that 
has become an associate of man not to be thorny; for man is 
certain to reject the more thorny for the less thorny. While not 
objectionable to other fruit-eaters, thorns are very much in man’s 
way. The result will be that in time sucha characteristic will be 
eliminated from all fruits that are cultivated. 
The raspberry has already made some moves in that direction 
till we have some excellent varieties that are nearly or quite thorn- 
less. If a new variety shows itself among blackberries that has 
left off its terrible barbs it will be sure of survival as one of the 
fittest things in the garden. So we say the pear has not been with 
*From Zhe Kansas City Review. 
Vou, III. z 
