THE APPLE. 
Py'rus Ma'lus L. 
Amone fruit-trees, the Apple is perhaps more charac- 
teristic of the North Temperate zone than is any other. 
The whole. genus Pyrus is confined, in a wild state, 
to the temperate and cold parts of the northern 
hemisphere, though Apples are now cultivated at the 
Cape, in Australia, and in New Zealand. The Apple 
cannot be grown within the Tropics or north of the 
Arctic Circle; but it rejoices in the dry climate and 
warm summers of Canada and the United States, and 
thus the white and pink blossoms of this tree and of 
its allies, the Pears, Services, and Rowans, brightening 
the spring landscape in woodland and hedgerow when 
bare of leaves, are a peculiar giory of our latitudes. 
The Apple stands alone among British trees as 
possessing a coloured corolla ; for the Horse-chestnut 
is not truly indigenous, the greater number of our 
arboreal flora have inconspicuous flowers without any 
corolla at all, and the rest, such as Cherry, Hawthorn, 
Thorn, Elder, and Guelder-rose, are of so pure a white 
that we often feel in spring as though we had returned 
to the sight of winter’s snows. As the fruit par 
excellence of the Teutonic area, the Apple has appro- 
priated as its popular name what was once a common 
Germanic term for fruit of any kind, Ap/el being once 
epl, and often apulder, connected with “ Maple” and 
“Mapulder,” and being still extended to many totally 
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