THE PEARS OF NEW YORK Il 
“if you graffe your peare upon a Mulbery, you shall have red Peares.” 
Stories of promiscuous grafting abound in the old books. Another is that 
if an apple be grafted on the pear, the fruit is a ‘‘ pearmain.”’ 
After Pliny follows a dreary and impenetrable period of 1500 years, 
in which time but few new facts regarding the evolution of the pear come 
to light in what is now Italy. The pear is mentioned, it is true, by many 
Roman writers, but all copy Theophrastus, Cato, and Pliny. Dioscorides, 
a learned Greek physician and botanist, who may be said to have been the 
author of the first book of ‘‘ applied science ”’ 
botanical and pomological authority for the first 1600 years of the present 
era, many editions of his book appeared and in several languages, and it 
is he who is most often quoted by writers on fruits even until the seventeenth 
century, but he adds nothing new on the pear, and does not even extend 
the list of known varieties. During these 1600 years a great number of 
voluminous commentaries on Dioscorides appeared, in several of which 
in botany, was the great 
names of new pears are mentioned, but, with the exception of one writer, 
the descriptions are so terse that the new sorts cannot be connected with 
older or later periods. The exception is Matthiolus (1501-1577), but since 
the English herbalists, in their turn, largely copy Matthiolus, with valuable 
amplifications, it is better to give space further on to them. 
Perhaps one more name should be mentioned among the Roman 
writers. Messer Pietro de Crescenzi, an Italian born at Bolonga in 1230, 
wrote a book on agriculture in which the chapters on fruits are especially 
well written. For reasons to be mentioned, this book had a remarkable 
influence on the horticulture of Europe for the next three or four centuries. 
With the discovery of printing, nearly two centuries after the book was 
written, Crescenzi was published in numerous editions and in several 
languages to the great enlightenment of pomologists on the cultivation 
of fruits, but with small additions to the knowledge of the fruits themselves. 
Whether because the book was really the most serviceable of its kind in 
the world for four centuries, or whether by virtue of the happy circumstance 
of being many times printed, it had absolute supremacy over other agri- 
cultural texts, is now too late to judge. There is good reason to suspect 
that Crescenzi’s is the precedence of circumstance, for he stole page after 
page from Palladius, of the fourth century, who, to be sure, in his turn, 
copied Columella and the Greeks. Most of these borrowings, however, 
meet the requirement of being ‘‘ bettered by the borrower ” that separates 
adoption from plagarism. 
