254 ENGLISK BOTANY. 



little water, peeled and placed on dishes with the stalks npperraost. In this state a 

 kind of syrup runs from them, which must be carefully poured out and set on one 

 Bide ; they are then placed on frames in an oven, and left there for twelve hours, from 

 which they are removed and steeped in the syrup sweetened with sugar and brandy : 

 this process is re])eated four times, and they are then left to dry, and if properly done will 

 be of a clear pale-brown colour, with tine half-transparent flesh. They are then arranged 

 in boxes, garnished with wliite paper, and offered for sale. They will remain good for 

 three years, but are considered best the first year. 



Tlie mode of making perry is precisely the same as for making cider, which is 

 described under the Apple. The Pears should be gathered before they begin to fall, and 

 they should be ground as soon as possible, to prevent the slight taste of decoinpositiou 

 which is often observable in perry unless very carefully made. Every Pear-tree, wliea 

 fully grown and in good soil, will produce about twenty gallons of perry a year, and 

 some in Herefordshire have yielded a hogshead in one season. Pears were considered 

 by the Romans to be an antidote to poisonous mushrooms, and we believe that nothing 

 is better than a draught of perry after an imprudent feast of that vegetable. Both 

 pears and apples contain an acid knoivn to the chemist as malic acid ; it is also present 

 in large quantities in the berries of the mountain-ash. This acid is used largely in calico- 

 printing operations, especially where a white figure is required on a black ground : it 

 is employed to discharge the black colour, which it does without injuring the cloth. 

 Recently it has been found that apples and pears contain so much of this malic acid as 

 to make them valuable chemical agents, and it is feared by the lovers of cider and perry 

 that the price given for them for this purpose may diminish the quantity of these 

 favourite beverages. 



With regard to the practical cultivation of the Pear-tree, we are told that a dry 

 deep loam is the best soil for it. Gravel is a good subsoil where the incumbent mould 

 is suitable. For wall trees the soil should be made good to the depth of two or three 

 feet ; for orcliard trees eighteen inches may do. Pear-trees on their own stocks will thrive 

 on soil where apples will not even live, supposing the ]ilants to be hai'dy varieties, little 

 removed from wild pears, and to have room to grow freely as standards. Mr. Knight's 

 mode of training a Pear-tree is as follows : — 



" A young jjear stock, which had two lateral branches upon each side, and was 

 about six feet high, was planted against a wall early in the spring of 1810, and it was 

 grafted in each of its lateral branches, two of which sprang out of the stem about four 

 feet from the ground, and others at the summit in the following year. The shoots 

 these grafts produced were about a foot long, were trained downwards, the undermost 

 nearly perpendicular, and the uppermost just below the horizontal line, placing them 

 at such distances that the leaves of one shoot did not at all shade those of another. 

 In the next year the same mode of training was continued, and the year following I 

 obtained an abundant crop of fruit." 



The wood of the Pear-tree is heavy, strong, compact, and of a fine grain slightly 

 tinged with red. It is readily stained black, and then so closely resembles ebony as 

 scarcely to be distinguishable from it. It is a good wood for many purposes in the ars,t 

 and is an excellent fuel. 



The oldest Pear-trees in the neighbourhood of London are at Twickenham, where 

 they may be seen from fifty to sixty feet high, and with trunks from eighteen inches to 

 three feet in diameter, and in all ]uobability came from the nursery of Master Richard 

 Pointer, Gerarde's " curious and cunning graffer." In Herefordshire there stood in the 

 year 1805 a tree which more than once filled fifteen hogsheads of perry in the same 



