greatest development in number of varieties, both cultivated and 
wild, and in perfection of fruit, in this section of the world. 
Wild apples, pears, apricots, cherries and plums form vast 
thickets on the mountain sides and pathless wilderness valleys 
of central and northern Asia. Wild plum thickets stretch for miles 
along the creeks and ravines of both Asia and North America, and 
in spring these thickets are one vast garden of flower and perfume. 
The apples are generally small, crab-like and sour, but varia- 
tion runs rife even among these wildlings, so that many a thicket 
tree produces fruit that is very palatable. One of the wild apple 
species has dark purple fruits, unfit to eat, but gorgeous in its 
rich coloring. Through hybridization, the time may come 
when we will have fine apples of this color. How far back into 
antiquity the association of man and the apple goes is in part 
answered by the occurrence of carbonized crab-like apples among 
the ruins of the Swiss lake dwellings of the Bronze age. The 
Romans are said to have first known apples about 449 B. C. Five 
hundred years later they had over a score of varieties. From 
Rome, the apple was brought to England, where in 1882, 1500 sorts 
were known. And in 1905 a bulletin of our own goverment de- 
scribed over 6,500 varieties, representing, however, only a fraction 
of the total number of kinds in the world. Though native to Asia 
and eastern Europe, the great apple growing regions of the world 
are the United States, western Europe, Tasmania, and southern 
Australia. 
Two very different kinds of wild pears made possible the 
present great pear industry of the world, the wild pear {P. 
communis ) of western Asia and eastern Europe and the hard, 
gritty sand pear of northern China. From the former came most 
of our eating pears such as the Bartlett, and from hybridizing the 
two species, came our cooking and long- keeping pears, such as 
the Kieffer and the Le Conte. The quince came to us through 
Rome and the island of Crete and the fruits in ancient times were 
called “apples of Cydon (Crete)”. 
Other apple-like fruits are the medlar, loquat, haw and june- 
berry, no one of which is as yet more than locally esteemed, 
although large orchards of big fruited haws are grown in China, 
and the loquat is beginning to be seen in our southern and western 
local markets. The loquat has a very distinctive sub-acid flavor, 
which will bring it into wider esteem as soon as certain shipping 
difficulties can be solved. The juneberry (shadberry) is still 
largely a fruit for pioneer districts, though it has great possibili- 
ties of improvement. 
Next in importance to the apple-like fruits in the minds of the 
white race are the peaches, apricots, plums and cherries. The 
finest peaches we owe to China, though they went a very round- 
about way to get to us. If one should see the little, hard, bitter 
wild peach of China, as some of our explorers have done, he 
would have been thankful that the Chinese became acquainted 
with it some twenty or more centuries before we did. Though 
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