1894.] Whence Came the Cultivated Strawberry. 303 
certainly I have always hoped that such would prove to be 
their origin. It is with much reluctance that I give up a 
pleasant and patriotic hypothesis; but everything is against 
it. I had long thought that the Pine strawberry of last cen- 
tury was only this robust form of our native species, a feeling 
to which the early conjectures of an American origin for the 
Pine lent color. But the Pine and the var. Tllinoensis are so un- 
like in habit that they could not have been confounded. When 
the var. Illinoensis was really introduced into Europe in 1852 
by Asa Gray, who secured it from the “wild and savage $ 
country in western New York, it was thought to be so distinct 
from all other strawberries that it was made a new species, 
Fragaria Grayana, although it is scarcely different, except in 
greater size, from the common Fragaria Virginiana. If this 
plant possessed such eminent and variable qualities as to have 
made it the parent of our garden varieties, it would certainly 
have given indications of them somewhere in its wide and 
varied range. As itis, it has only now and then come into 
cultivation, when its behavior has been such that it has soon 
been discarded, as in the well known instance of the recent 
Crystal City. I have also tried to cultivate it, and its response, 
like the Crystal City, is mostly in leaves and runners, not in any 
permanent or striking modification. It is true that the botan- 
ical features of the garden strawberries and the var. Illinoensis 
are much alike, particularly in herbarium specimens, and for 
some time I was not able to separate them readily ; but there 
are botanical characters, even aside from habit, which distin- 
guish them. The garden strawberries are lower in habit, pro- 
ducing runners freely only after fruiting, with shorter petioles 
and more leaves springing from the crown of the plant, and 
the leaves are spreading—all of which are striking peculiari- 
ties of the Chilian plant,—while in the native plant the leaves 
stand up on long nearly perpendicular stalks and the runners 
are produced at flowering time; the leaflets are thick and firm 
in texture, broader than in Jilinoensis and lacking the long 
narrow base of the native, with mostly rounder teeth, and 
they are particularly distinguished by the dark upper surface 
and the bluish-white under surface of the mature leaflets, the 
