70 THE APPLE-TREE. 



In the face of experience there can be no doubt of the truth, 

 of Knight's theory that any given variety of fruit can have but 

 a limited period of existence ; that varieties must necessarily run 

 out and disappear as it were, by exhaustion. 



It is a fact that old kinds are most diseased, that "those 

 apples which have been long in cultivation are on the decay. . . . 

 and the fruit like the parent tree is affected by the debilitated 

 old age of the variety. 



If Lindley and others oppose this conclusion, seeing no 

 reason why a tree, in itself or in its scions, might not be sempi- 

 ternal, and point to the seeming regeneration of ^he Golden 

 Pippin upon the mountain slopes of Maderia 3,000 feet above 

 the sea, it might be replied that though relinquishing the 

 analogies in animal life, we are everywhere confronted with 

 corroborative facts from the book of nature — in so far as nature 

 has been subjected to culture; as for the Black-Thorn and the 

 wild Ass's colt, they may remain much the same through all the 

 25,000 years of the great Platonic period. 



The references would be endless : we need only example 

 the potatoe ; steadfast to its primitive type in the Mexican 

 Cordilleras, it wantons into varieties which die out in 

 cultivation. Look at its record in recent times. Where now 

 are the Golden Dons, Pink Ladies, Nankins, and Blue Farmers 

 of our boyhood ? They were as good as any since, but they are 

 gone from the face of the earth. 



The early French settlers in N. America were renowned 

 planters, and they left their marks from the St. Lawrence to the 

 Gulf of Mexico. Among the first attempts to civilize the 

 Indians, apple culture was by far the most successful, indeed 

 they would take to nothing else kindly, and until lately mossy 

 relics of Johnny Apple Seed in many an old Indian orchard 

 down by the fertile springs of Maryland and Virginia, and the 

 forgotten hunting grounds of the Cherokees, were still remaining. 



The haughty and unscrupulous Catherine of Eussia, who 

 gave a jewelled snuff-box to Sir Josuha Reynolds, was extremely 

 fond of English Pippins, though that might have been 

 nothing more than a woman's whim, for the Queen of George 

 III, was accustomed to received annually a particular kind of 

 apple from Germany called from that circumstance " Queen's 

 Apple." 



