42 THE CHERRIES OF NEW YORK 



southern Asia as far east as northern India. It must not be thought that 

 the plant is everywhere abundant in the great area outHned as its habitat. 

 To the contrary, the Sweet Cherry is an uncommon wild plant in Spain, 

 Italy and other parts of southern Europe. All authorities agree that the 

 region of greatest communal intensity for Prunus avium is between the 

 Caspian and Black Seas and south of these bodies of water. It might 

 suffice to say that from about these seas the Sweet Cherry came — that 

 here grew the trunk from which branches were spread into other lands 

 by birds and animals carrying the seeds from place to place. The most 

 important fact to be established, however, is that this cherry has long 

 grown spontaneously over a widely extended territory and may, therefore, 

 have been domesticated in several widely separated regions. 



THE CHERRY IN GREECE; THE FIRST RECORD OF CULTURE AND THE NAME 



Having established the habitats of the two cultivated cherries we 

 may next ask when and where their cultivation began. The domesti- 

 cation of plants probably began in China — certainly Chinese agriculttire 

 long antedates that of any other nation now in existence of which we have 

 records. Agriculture in China, historians roughly approximate, goes back 

 4,000 years. But while the Chinese have many other species of cherry, 

 as we have seen, some of which may be said to be partially domesticated, 

 Prunus cerasus and Prunus avium are not found wild in China and were 

 only in recent years introduced there as cultivated plants. Neither does 

 the cherry of our civilization seem to have been known in the second 

 great agriculttiral region of the world — Egypt and the extreme south- 

 west of Asia. At least there are no words for the cherry in the languages 

 of the peoples of that region and cherry pits have not been found with 

 the remains of other plants in the tombs and ruins of Egypt, Assyria and 

 Babylon. Nor does the cherry seem to have been cultivated in India 

 until comparatively recent times. 



These very brief and general statements show that cherries were 

 not cultivated in the first agricultural civilizations and serve to fix the 

 time and the place of the domestication of the cherry a little more 

 definitely. Records of cherries as ctiltivated plants begin, so far as the 

 researches of botanical historians now show, with Greek civilization though 

 it is probable, for several reasons, that some cultivated cherries came to 

 Greece from Asia Minor. 



Theophrastus, to whom Linnaeus gave the title " Father of Botany," 



