THE CRAB, 
ITS CHARACTERISTICS AND ASSOCIATIONS. 
“ I pry’thee let me bring thee where Crabs grow.” 
(Shakspeare , Tempest, IP 2.) 
The “Early History of the Apple and Pear” has already been given, but the Crab, also, 
may well deserve special attention, since it has been generally considered that most of our cultivated 
Apples are derivable from an improvement of the native Crab. The pips vegetate readily, but 
they grow slowly, and it requires from eight to ten years for them to bear. The majority of the 
seedlings will be like the parent plant, but a few will produce a finer or more eatable fruit, and from 
these again still better apples could be produced. The process is tedious and thus the young Crab 
trees that are produced are now used only for grafting. “ Certainly,” Phillips has observed in his 
“ Companion to the Orchard,”—“ it is on this stock that most of our valuable Apples have 
been grafted and raised by the ingenuity of the gardeners, who have by saving the seeds and 
studying the soil, so improved and multiplied the varieties of this most excellent fruit, that it has 
now become of great national importance, affording an agreeable and wholesome diet in a thousand 
shapes to all classes of society ” (p. 33). This statement however has reference to the educated 
and improved Crab, and we must first contemplate it in its natural wild state. 
The Crab, or Wild Apple, designated Pyrus Malus by Linnseus, is now to be found growing 
in most British woods, as far north as Morayshire, in Scotland. Modern botanists have made two 
varieties of the Crab, Pyrus acerba, having smooth leaves and small sour fruit; and Pyrus mitis , 
having the leaves, pedicels, under side of the leaves and young branches, woolly. It is believed, 
however, that this last is a derivative from seeds of the cultivated Apples accidentally dispersed. 
Pyrus acerba is the indigenous Crab, and to this our remarks will apply. Blossoming as it does in 
company with the Cowslip and other May flowers exciting to poetry, it pregents where located by 
the side of rural winding brooks, one of the loveliest sights of Spring :— 
“ The jay’s red breast 
Peeps over her nest, 
In the midst of the crab-blossoms blushing.”— Howitt. 
.Indeed as far as beauty is conferred, the “wildings of nature” may have a more charming 
aspect than cultivated varieties, and so Dr. Withering remarks in his British Botany, that “ the 
