RIVER CRAB APPLE. 
23 
a tree about the size of the Siberian Crab, to which it 
has a close affinity, and grows from 15 to 25 feet in 
height, producing a hard wood, capable of receiving a 
high polish, and is employed by the natives for making 
wedges. The fruit grows in clusters, and is small and 
purple, scarcely the size of a cherry, of an agreeable 
flavour, like that of some of our Haws; it has nothing of 
the acerbity or acidity of the Common Crab, but is 
sweetish and subacid when ripe. The natives near the 
sea employ it, as they do many more berries of the 
country, for food, being all too indolent to cultivate the 
earth for any purpose whatever. 
It extends, in all probability, from Upper California to 
the Russian possessions in the north, as far as the lati- 
tude of 57°. Menzies appears to have been its first dis- 
coverer, on what was then vaguely termed the North- 
West coast. 
The leaves, which appear with the flowers, are ovate, 
obtuse or acute, entire, and more or less serrated, pubes- 
cent beneath, villous in the bud, at length nearly smooth; 
the later produced leaves are more or less incisely 
lobed, sometimes distinctly 3-lobed, the middle lobe 
incise and sharply serrated. The flowers conspicuous, 
white or tinged with red, in terminal corymbs, with the 
calyx and peduncles villous, or tomentose, at other times 
with the exterior of the calyx smooth. The petals oval. 
The germ is pear-shaped, with 3 or 4 styles. Apples 
very small, dark purple, almost black when ripe, and 
somewhat translucent, globose-ovoid, scarcely umbilicate 
at base, and with the summit naked, the calyx, as in the 
Siberian Crab, being deciduous. Seeds, like those of 
the apple, and 2 in a cell, as usual. 
I think it probable that the plants with “smooth 
pedicels and with the calyx externally smooth,” ought to 
constitute a distinct variety, which may be termed 
