ORIGIN OF CULTIVATED FRUITS 279 
The strawberry. The United States, like Europe from Lap- 
land to the Mediterranean, was well stocked with wild straw- 
berries. A good start had been made in an early day toward 
developing garden varieties from this source, and the writer has 
eaten freely in boyhood of such varieties. 
Before final results were at hand, however, and before the 
best use had been made of this native stock,! a new species from 
Chile had been introduced into England, and from there to this 
country, where it has become the parent of all commercial varie- 
ties, wholly displacing the races developed from the native stock. 
The Chilean species extends into our own western mountains, but 
fails to succeed when brought directly from there to the East. 
The strawberry is widely scattered over the earth, a fact due 
partly to its cosmopolitan character and partly to the facility 
with which birds scatter the seeds, in which respect this fruit 
is equaled by few and surpassed by none. 
Notwithstanding all this, the strawberry is one of the newest 
of additions to cultivated plants, dating in all probability not back 
of the fifteenth century. It is difficult to realize how so luscious 
a fruit should be so long neglected, except upon the assumption 
that in its present form it has not long existed. 
The raspberry. Europe supports many varieties of Rudbas 
zdeus, both red and white, but, like the grape, they all proved 
unsuited to American conditions, and, as before, recourse was 
had to the wild. Naturally the early efforts were directed to the 
red berries, following the European type, and later to the black 
caps, which upon acquaintance immediately took the lead. 
The real cultivation of native American raspberries dates, 
according to Bailey,? not earlier than 1860, when L. F. Allen 
of New York sent out two red varieties, Allen’s Red Prolific 
and Allen’s Antwerp, which were ‘‘merely accidental varieties of 
1 It is an open question whether the wild red strawberry of the eastern 
United States is identical with the Aragaria vesca of Europe. The difference is 
evidently slight, but enough to lead some botanists to give it a separate name,— 
sometimes Fragaria virginiana and again Fragaria americana. 
2 Kyolution of our Native Fruits,” p. 286. 
