404 JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



facts known about the plant. To take an example, under genus 

 1129, Prunus, the first column gives species 7056 avmeniaca L. The 

 second column the English name, Common Apricot, The third shows 

 habit and gives a small symbol representing a leafless tree, signifying 

 that it is deciduous. Column 4 shows duration and treatment in the 

 garden generally by combining certain symbols. Here it is blank, 

 which signifies it is hardy, and as the preceding column showed it to 

 be a tree it is unnecessary to state it is perennial by a A- 5^ 

 popular character, fr.= fruit. 6, height, 15 feet. 7, time of flower- 

 ing, f. mr. = February, March. 8, colour of flower ; W. = white. 

 9, native country : Levant. 10, year of introduction of exotics, 

 or localities of British species, 1548 in this case. 11, mode of pro- 

 pagation ; L = layers. 12, soil ; b. (should be h. = heavy rich clay). 

 13, reference to a figure ; Lam. 111. t. 431 = Lamarck's " Illustrations 

 de Genres." On the opposite page is a line of description 

 sufficient for the recognition of the species, in this case ' ' flowers 

 sessile, leaves subcordate " ; and below is a figure of two fruits and 

 leaves engraved from drawings made for the work by Sowerby, 

 assisted by Don and the Messrs. Loddiges. It seems needless to 

 praise them for accuracy after mentioning such nam_es, and though 

 so small they are very useful. A note tells us 



" Prunus armeniaca, Abricot Fr., Abricosenbaum Ger., Albicocco 

 Ital., Aibarcoque Portug., is a fruit tree next in esteem to the peach. 

 From its trivial name it is generally supposed to have originated in 

 Armenia, but Regnier and Sickler assign it a parallel between the Niger 

 and the Atlas, and Dallas states it to be a native of the whole of the 

 Caucasus, the mountains there, to the top, being covered with it. 

 Thunberg describes it as a very large, spreading, branchy tree in 

 Japan. Grossier says that it covers the barren mountains to the 

 west of Pekin, that the Chinese have a great many varieties of the 

 tree double-blossomed, which they plant on little mounts for orna- 

 ment, and dwarfs in pots for their apartments. It appears from 

 Turner's ' Herbal ' that the apricot was cultivated here in 1562, 

 and in Hakluyt's ' Remembrancer,' 1582, it is affirmed that the 

 apricot was procured out of Italy by Wolfe, a French priest, gardener 

 to Henry VIIL The fruit seems to have been known in Italy in the 

 time of Dioscorides under the name of Praecocia, probably, as Regnier 

 supposes, from the Arabic Berkoch ; whence the Tuscan Bacoche or 

 Albicocco and the English Apricock ; or, as Professor Martyn observes, 

 a tree when first introduced might have been called a praecox or early 

 fruit, and gardeners, taking the article a for the first syllable of the 

 word, might easily have corrupted it to ' apricocks.' The orthography 

 seems to have been finally changed to ' apricot ' about the end of the 

 last century. 



" There are fifteen or twenty excellent varieties of apricot, besides 

 the peach apricot, a large fruit supposed to be a hybrid between a 

 peach and an apricot. The trees are generally budded on plum stocks, 

 and always trained against walls. Apricots do not force freely." 



