78 THE PEACHES OF NEW YORK 



pubescent, one-celled, surmounted by a simple style which is terminated with a small 

 stigma, the whole pistil equaHng the stamens in length or longer. 



Fruit a fleshy drupe, sub-globular but much modified in shape and size under culti- 

 vation; suture usually distinct; cavity well marked, abrupt; apex with a mamelon or 

 mucronate tip; color varying from greenish-white to orange-yellow, usually with a red 

 cheek on the side exposed to the sun, sometimes covered with red; very pubescent except 

 in the nectarine; skin adherent or free from the pulp; flesh greenish-white or yellowish, 

 often stained with red at the pit, occasionally red, sweetish, acidulous, aromatic; stone 

 free or clinging, elliptic or ovoid, sometimes flat, compressed, pointed; outer surfaces 

 wrinkled and pitted, inner surfaces polished; ventral and dorsal sutures grooved or fur- 

 rowed, sometimes winged; the seed almond-like, aromatic, bitter. 



The characters given in the foregoing description are those of the 

 cultivated peach — the consummate^ fruit of Prunus persica. The generic 

 name, Prunus, is the ancient Latin name of the plum, Prunus domestica, 

 the type species. The specific name, persica, commemorates the old 

 belief that the peach came from Persia. The common name, peach, in 

 English, as in most European languages, is a derivative from persica. 

 Amygdalus, found several times in the synonomy, is the Syrian name of 

 the almond. The drupe-fruits are put in two, three and sometimes four 

 genera by various botanists but in the fruit-books issued by this Station, 

 following most botanists and pomologists, all are put in a single genus, 

 Prunus. Such lumping of several distinct fruits into one genus has its 

 disadvantages but the several fruits cannot be reasonably separated because 

 outliers closely connect all. Hybridization between the cultivated stone- 

 fruits adds to the perplexities of classification. 



Prunus persica is variously divided by botanists and pomologists. 

 Quite commonly two botanical varieties of edible peaches are split off, 

 as shown in the synonomy, to separate the nectarine and the fiat peaches 

 from the pubescent and globular peaches. But these sub-species, originat- 

 ing over and over in the case of the nectarine as a bud or seed-mutation 

 and the flat peaches probably having originated as a mutation, are not 

 more distinct from the parent species than the red-fieshed sorts, the snow- 

 ball peaches, the Yellow Transvaals from South Africa, the nippled peach, 

 the cleft peach, the beaked peach, the winter peaches of China, or the 

 pot-grown dwarfs from China; in fact, are not more different from other 

 peaches than a clingstone is from a freestone, a yellow flesh from a white 

 flesh or a large-flowered from a small-flowered sort. AlK constitute merely 

 pomological groups, which, more and more, are becoming interminably 

 confused by hybridization. 



