36 THE PLUMS OF NEW YORK. 



between the sorts described by the Greeks and Romans at the beginning 

 of the Christian Era and those we are now growing. So, too, one often 

 finds half -wild chance seedlings with fruit indistinguishable from varieties 

 under the highest cultivation. This pronounced immutability of the 

 species is one of its chief characteristics. 



There are probably several sub -divisions of Prunus insititia but material 

 does not exist in America for the proper determination of the true place for 

 these forms, and the Old World botanists cannot agree in regard to them. 

 It is probable that Prunus subsylvestris Boutigny' and Prunus pomarium 

 Boutigny' belong to Prunus insititia and almost beyond question Prunus 

 syriaca Koehne •■ is the yellow-fruited Mirabelle of this species. Prunus 

 insititia glaberrima Wirtg.* occasionally found in the herbaria of Europe 

 has, with its small, roundish-obovate leaves, but little appearance of Prunus 

 insititia and may be, as Schneider surmises,' a cross between Prunus spinosa 

 and the Myrobalan of Prunus cerasifera. 



The Insititia plums are second in importance only to the Dorriesticas. 

 Their recorded history is older. This is the plum of the Greek poets, 

 Archilochus and Hippona, in the Sixth Century B. C' Theophrastus, 

 the philosopher, mentioned it three hundred years before Christ, as did 

 PoUtix, the writer and grammarian, a century before the Savior, while 

 Dioscorides, the founder of botany, during the last named period, distin- 

 guishes between this plum and one from Syria, presumably a Domestica. 

 This is one of the twelve kinds of plums described by Pliny (see page 17) 

 who calls it the Damascene, so-called from Damascus in Syria, and says 

 of it, " introduced long since into Italy." It is the Damask plum of 

 Columella when in his tenth book he says: 



" then are the wicker baskets cramm'd 

 With Damask and Armenian and Wax plums." 



The yellow plums of the Roman poets, Ovid and Vergil, are probably the 

 BuUaces or Mirabelles of this species. Indeed, its cultivation was probably 

 prehistoric, for Heer ' has illustrated and described stones of a plum found 



"■Bui. Soc. Dauph. fasc. VIII. 1881. 



' Ibid. 



' Dendrol. 316. 1893. 



* Rhein. Reise-Fl. 67. 1857. 



' Handb. Laubh. i: 631. 1906. 



' Pickering, Charles Chron. Hist. Plants. 218. 1879. 



' Heer Pflandz. Pfahl. 27, fig. i6c. 



