Io THE PEARS OF NEW YORK 
as a medicine as well as a food, had curious notions as to their digestibility, 
and, as with most plants, ascribed other marvelous qualities to them. 
Thus, Pliny says: 
‘All kinds of pears, as an aliment, are indigestible, to persons in 
robust health, even; but to invalids they are forbidden as rigidly as wine. 
Boiled, however, they are remarkably agreeable and wholesome, those of 
the Crustumium in particular. All kinds of pears, too, boiled with honey, 
are wholesome to the stomach. Cataplasms of a resolvent nature are made 
with pears, and a decoction of them is used to disperse indurations. They 
are efficacious, also, in cases of poisoning by mushrooms and fungi, as much 
by reason of their heaviness, as by the neutralizing effects of their juice. 
“The wild pear ripens but very slowly. Cut in slices and hung in 
the air to dry, it arrests looseness of the bowels, an effect which is equally 
produced by a decoction of it taken in drink; in which case the leaves are 
also boiled up together with the fruit. The ashes of pear-tree wood are 
even more efficacious as an antidote to the poison of fungi. 
“A load of apples or pears, however small, is singularly fatiguing to 
beasts of burden; the best plan to counteract this, they say, is to give the 
animals some to eat, or at least to show them the fruit before starting.” 
There is in the books of these old farmer-writers a mass of sagacious 
teachings which can never be outlived — will always underlay the best 
practice. Followed carefully, except in the matter of pests, the precepts 
of Cato and Varro would as certainly lead to success as the mandates of 
the modern experiment stations with all the up-to-date appliances for 
carrying out their commands. Sagacity fails, however, in one respect 
in these Roman husbandmen— all are fettered by superstitions. In 
these old books on the arts of husbandry, woven in with the practical 
precepts, which stand well the test of science, superstitions abound 
beyond present belief. Thus, whenever the discourse turns to pears, from 
Diophanes, who lived in Asia Minor a century before Christ, down through 
the ages in Greece, Italy, France, Belgium to the eighteenth century in 
England, runs the superstition, with various modifications, that to grow 
the best pears you must bore a hole through the trunk at the ground and 
drive in a plug of oak or beech over which the earth must be drawn. If 
the wound does not heal, it must be washed for a fortnight with the lees 
of wine. As the superstition waned, the apologetic injunction usually 
follows, that, in any event the wine-lees will improve the flavor of the 
fruit. Another superstition, current for centuries, accepted by Cato and 
Varro, and handed on with abiding faith almost to modern times was, as 
stated by Barnaby Googe, a farmer and writer subject of Queen Elizabeth, 
