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VII. A Report upon the Varieties of Apricot cultivated in the 

 Garden of the Horticultural Society, By Mr. Robert Thomp- 

 son, Under Gardener in the Fruit Department. 



Read February 15, 1831. 



Fe w fruits are less accurately known than Apricots, or have their 

 nomenclature in a state of greater confusion. To the seventeen 

 distinct varieties comprehended in the following remarks, belong 

 at least from seventy to eighty synonyms, and of the names which 

 I have not enumerated, there is reason to believe that the greater 

 part, certainly the most important part, is referable to some one 

 of the varieties now about to be described. It has been therefore 

 thought advisable that a report upon this very useful fruit, should 

 be one of the first supplied from the Garden, notwithstanding the 

 want of precise information upon some kinds ; a circumstance which 

 has been caused in a greater degree by the extreme inaccuracy of 

 the names under which they have been received into the Garden, 

 than even by the unfavourable seasons that have lately been ex- 

 perienced in this climate. The whole of the conclusions at which I 

 have arrived, have been the result of personal examination, in suc- 

 cessive summers, of trees in the Society's Garden growing upon walls, 

 and I have rarely trusted to books for the determination of syno- 

 nyms ; this I have thought it right to state, in order to explain why in 

 one or two cases the identifications of pomological writers have not 

 been admitted as certain. The fact is that our books are filled 

 already with so many errors in consequence of an implicit ad- 

 mission by one writer of the opinions of another, that it has been 

 thought better to omit certain synonyms altogether, rather than 



