PART II. FRUITS. CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTION.-FRUITS OF THE TEMPERATE CLIMATES. FLESHY FRUITS.-APPLE; PEAR; QUINCE; ORNAMENTAL CRABS; MEDlar. WHETHER we regard their beauty, their variety, the extent over which they are diffused, or their agreeableness and value to man, there is no class of substances more interesting than the Fruits. Their progressive cultivation, and their removal, by wandering tribes or conquerors, from region to region, associate them in a very remarkable degree with the history of the human race. This historical connexion of fruits with the progress of civilization is sometimes fabulous, and generally obscure; but the great revolutions of society may be traced in their gradual distribution over the surface of the globe: for whereever man has penetrated, in that spirit of change and activity which precedes or accompanies civilization, he has assisted the dissemination of vegetable productions much more surely and rapidly than the birds which bear their seeds from land to land, than the currents of the ocean, or even the winds. If we examine, for example, the fruits of our own U country, we shall at once see how their introduction has accompanied the great changes in its social state. Before the invasion of the Romans, the natives of these islands probably possessed no other than the wild fruits of Northern Europe,-the crab, the sloe, the hazel-nut, and the acorn. The Romans themselves had, but a few centuries before, obtained their principal fruits from the countries of the East, and from Greece and its islands. Hirschfield and Sickler, laborious writers on the history of cultivated vegetables, are of opinion that the Romans derived the fig from Syria, the orange or citron from Media, the peach from Persia, the apricot from Epirus, the pomegranate from Africa, the plum, the cherry, the apple, and the pear from Armenia. Pliny mentions that they had twenty-two sorts of apples; thirty of pears; three of quinces; a variety of plums and cherries; peaches, nectarines, apricots, and almonds; and various sorts of olives. And yet, under the reign of the first Tarquin, the olive did not exist in Italy, although Homer and Hesiod mention it as cultivated in Greece *. A cherry-tree laden with fruit adorned the triumph of Lucullus;-the dictator had brought the plant to Rome as a precious memorial of his victory over Mithridates, in whose province of Pontus he had found the treet. In less than a century, the same species of cherry was common in France, in Germany, and in England, where the conquerors had introduced it,-imparting some few blessings, while they inflicted countless miseries in their progress to universal dominion. Thus, the cherry, and in all probability the peach, the plum, the apple, and the pear of England, are evidences that it was once a colony of Rome. Whatever are the evils of war and conquest, and they are very great, 312. * Humboldt, Géographie des Plantes, + See p. they yet contributed, in the early stages of society, to diffuse the knowledge of the arts of cultivation. Plutarch, with the partiality arising from his subject, says that Alexander, by his progress into India, which opened communications between distant nations, had more benefited mankind than all the speculative philosophers of Greece. But when civilization is advanced, war is no longer in any way an instrument even of incidental good-it is an unmitigated evil. The spread of a milder, though not a less powerful sway-that of the Church-introduced new fruits into Great Britain. The monks, after the conversion of the Anglo-Saxons to Christianity, appear to have been the only gardeners. As early as 674, we have a record, describing a pleasant and fruitbearing close at Ely, then cultivated by Brithnoth, the first Abbot of that place. The ecclesiastics subsequently carried their cultivation of fruits as far as was compatible with the nature of the climate, and the horticultural knowledge of the middle ages, Whoever has seen an old abbey, where for generations destruction only has been at work, must have almost invariably found it situated in one of the choicest spots, both as to soil and aspect; and if the hand of injudicious improvement has not swept it away, there is still the " Abbey-garden." Even though it has been wholly neglected -though its walls be in ruins, covered with stonecrop and wall-flower, and its area produce but the rankest weeds-there are still the remains of the aged fruit-trees-the venerable pears, the delicate little apples, and the luscious black cherries. The chesnuts and the walnuts may have yielded to the axe, and the fig-trees and vines died away ;-but sometimes the mulberry is left, and the strawberry and the raspberry struggle among the ruins. There is a moral lesson in these memorials of the monastic ages. The monks, with all their faults, were generally men of peace and study; and these monuments shew that they were improving the world, while the warriors were spending their lives to spoil it. In many parts of Italy and France, which had lain in desolation and ruin from the time of the Goths, the monks restored the whole surface to fertility; and in Scotland and Ireland there probably would not have been a fruit-tree till the sixteenth century, if it had not been for their peaceful labours. It is generally supposed that the monastic orchards were in their greatest perfection from the twelfth to the fifteenth century. The Crusades, impolitic and unjust as they were in principle, contributed something to the improvement of European society; and, by renewing a communication with the countries of the East, they again assisted the diffusion of those vegetable treasures which had been neglected after the destruction of the Roman empire. The monastic gardens owed many of their choicest fruits to the care of those provident ecclesiastics who had accompanied the expeditions to the Holy Land. This improvement of the country by the monks was a natural effect of their superiority in knowledge and wealth to the people by whom they were surrounded. In the same manner, the ecclesiastics who have settled in South America, from the time of the discovery of the New World, have caused almost all the fruits of temperate Europe to flourish amidst the productions of the torrid zone. "In studying the history of the conquest," says Humboldt, we admire the extraordinary rapidity with which the Spaniards of the sixteenth century spread the cultivation of the European vegetables along the ridge of the Cordilleras, from one extremity of the continent to the other;" and he attributes this remarkable effect of 66 |