ORIGIN OF CULTIVATED FRUITS 271 
The sour cherry (Prunus cerasus). The student will not fail to 
notice the close relationship granted the plums and the cherries 
in putting these seemingly very different fruits in the same genus. 
This illustrates one of the troubles of the botanists, for there also 
belong in the same goodly company the chokecherries and the 
wild, black, and red cherries, that grow upon branching stems 
like currants. 
While America has some of these so-called wild cherries, 
they have never yielded to attempts at amelioration, and we are 
dependent upon foreign species for our fruits. 
The species given above is undoubtedly a native of Asia Minor, 
in the neighborhood of the Caspian, and its allied species, the 
bird cherry (Prunus acvdium), from which our white and black 
varieties are developed, is wild in Persia and the hilly regions to 
the west as far even as Algeria. We will not enter into the dis- 
pute as to whether these two species are distinct, or whether the 
former has been developed from the latter, such discussions 
having lost much of their interest in recent days, since we have 
learned how quickly new forms may rise from others and pre- 
sent differences that any botanist, not knowing the history, would 
call specific. 
Curiously enough, the cherry succeeds wonderfully as an 
ornamental plant in Japan, where it flowers profusely but 
rarely fruits. 
The peach (Amygdalus persica). This delicious fruit is a 
strange customer in our orchards. A kind of mean between a 
bush and a tree, it- yields one of the most toothsome fruits 
known to the palate. Its strangeness consists in its relation to 
another fruit, the nectarine, which closely resembles the peach, 
except that instead of the downy covering, it is smooth like 
the plum. 
The strange part of it is that peaches and nectarines often 
grow upon the same tree; that is, a tree or a part of a tree 
that has always borne peaches may suddenly begin to bear nec- 
tarines, after which it may produce either peaches or nectarines. 
