304 Pliny's natural histoey. [BookXY* 
hard and firm by being first put in boiling ^"^ sea-water, and 
then left to dry for three days in the sun, care being taken that 
the dews of the night do not touch them ; after which they 
are hung up, and when wanted for use, washed with fresh 
water. M. Varro recommends that they should be kept in 
large vessels filled with sand : if they are not ripe, he says 
that they should be put in pots with the bottom broken out, 
and then buried^^ in the earth, all access to the air being care- 
fully shut, and care being first taken to cover the stalk with 
pitch. By this mode of treatment, he assures us, they will 
attain a larger size than they would if left to ripen on the tree. 
As for the other kinds of pomes, he says that they should be 
wrapped up separately in fig-leaves, the windfalls being care-, 
fully excluded, and then stored in baskets of osier, or else 
covered over with potters' earth. 
Pears are kept in earthen vessels pitched inside ; when 
filled, the vessels are reversed and then buried in pits. The 
Tarentine pear, Yarro says, is gathered very late, while the 
Anician keeps very well in raisin wine. Sorb apples, too, are 
similarly kept in holes in the ground, the vessel being turned 
upside down, and a layer of plaster placed on the lid: it should be 
buried two feet deep, in a sunny spot; sorbs^^are also hung, like 
grapes, in the inside of large vessels, together with the branches. 
Some of the more recent authors are found to pay a more 
scrupulous degree of attention to these various particulars, and 
recommend that the gathering of grapes or pomes, which are 
intended for keeping, should take place while the moon is on 
the wane,^^ after the third hour of the day, and while the 
weather is clear, or dry winds prevail. In a similar manner, 
the selection, they say, ought to be made from a dry spot, and 
the fruit should be plucked before it is fully ripe, a moment 
being chosen while the moon is below the horizon. Grapes, 
they say, should be selected that have a strong, hard mallet- 
stalk, and after the decayed berries have been carefully re- 
moved with a pair of scissors, they should be hung up inside of 
'^■^ As Fee remarks, the fruit, if treated thus, would soon lose all the 
properties for which it is valued. 
2s De Re Eust. B. i. c. 59. 
29 A faulty proceeding, however dry it may be. 
30 This fruit, Fee remarks, keeps but indi(ferently, and soon becomes 
soft, vinous, and acid. 
21 An absurd superstition. 
