270 DOMESTICATED ANIMALS AND PLANTS 
(Prunus americana), with its variations, from which many of our 
best cultivated varieties are descended. 
Plums were cultivated by the Romans, but were not known 
to the lake dwellers or other ancient people. They have been 
cultivated, too, in China from early times, but the original stock 
has not been certainly identified, though related species grew 
wild in the neighborhood of the Caucasus and in the western 
forests of the Chinese empire. 
The plum was native in all the northern United States, and 
every pioneer has satisfied his ‘fruit tooth” and graced his table 
many times from the stock found growing along the river bottoms 
everywhere. Strangely enough, according to Bailey,! our best 
authority, no commercial variety has ever been developed from 
northern native stock east of Michigan, but the wild plums to 
the south and west have been prolific of good varieties. This 
was probably because the cultivated European sorts succeeded 
well in the north, making resort to the wild unnecessary, while 
from Virginia south they were not satisfactory. Here resort was 
naturally back to the wild. Thus necessity is the mother not 
only of invention but of domestication as well. The Miner was 
produced in Tennessee ; the Robinson in North Carolina; the 
Wayland “came up”’ in a plum thicket in Kentucky; the Golden 
Beauty was “ found wild” in Texas ; the Pottawattamie in Ten- 
nessee ; andthe Newman in Kentucky. The Wolf originated from 
seed gathered from wild trees in Iowa, and the Rollingstone was 
“found” on the banks of Rollingstone Creek in Minnesota.? 
Every boy knows that certain trees or bushes produce nuts 
or fruits much better than others of the same species. Every 
neighborhood that grows wild fruit of any kind has its trees 
or bushes which yield fruit of superior size or flavor, or both. 
It is from such as these that many new varieties have sprung, 
a fact to be borne in mind when we come to the discussion of 
mutation later on, 
1" Evolution of our Cultivated Fruits,” p. 170. 
2" Principles of Breeding,” p. 133. 
