tree, that give a gaiety to the plantations in March and April, a season when no other trees are in blossom. In favourable seasons, the fruit often comes to good perfection in this country; but these almonds will not keep so well as those produced in warmer climates.

APPLE-TREE.-MALUS.

In Botany, a Species of the Pyrus, belonging to the Genus of Icosandria Pentagynia.

THAT the apple-tree is a native of the Eastern part of the world, we have the authority of the earliest writers, both in the Sacred History, as well as by the information given by the naturalists of ancient Greece and Rome. The Prophet Joel, where he declareth the destruction of the fruits of the earth by a long drought, mentions the fruits which were held in estimation, and among them he names the apple-tree.

"The Greeks call them medica," says Pliny," after the country from whence they were first brought in old times." Others were called epirotica, from Epirus, their native country; and that these were the same species of fruit that we call apples at this time, there can be no doubt; as they are

described in Pliny's Natural History as a fruit that hath a tender skin to be pared off; and he mentions Crabs and wildings as being smaller; "and for their harsh sourness, they have," says he, " many a foul word and shrewd curse given them."

Apple-trees, from the earliest accounts, seem to have required the fostering care of man. Of all the fruit-trees in Italy, Pliny says the apple is the tenderest, and least able to bear heat or cold, particularly the early kind that produces the sweet Jennitings, For a long time the apple-tree was of the highest value among fruit-trees with the Romans: "there are many apple-trees," says Pliny, "in the villages near Rome that let for the yearly sum of 2,000 sesterces," which is equal to £12. 10s. of our money; "and some of them,” says this author, "yield more profit to the owner than a small farm, and which brought about the invention of grafting. There are apples that have ennobled the countries from whence they came; and many apples have immortalized their first founders and inventors. Our best apples," continues he, "will honour the first grafters for ever; such as took their names from Matius, Cestius, Manlius, and Claudius." Pliny particularizes the quince apple, that came from

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a quince grafted upon an apple stock, which he says, smell like the quince, and were called Appiana, after Appius, who was of the Claudian House, and who was the first that practised this grafting. "Some apples," says Pliny, are so red that they resemble blood, which is caused by their being at first grafted upon a mulberry stock;" but of all the apples he has mentioned, he says, the one which took its name from Petisia, who reared it in his time, was the most excellent for eating, both on account of it's sweetness and agreeable flavour. He mentions nine and twenty kinds of apples as being cultivated in Italy at about the commencement of the Christian era. The grafting of trees was carried to it's greatest extent about this time. "I have seen," says Pliny, "near to Thuliæ, in the Tyburtines country, a tree grafted and laden with all manner of fruits, one bough bearing nuts, another berries; here hung grapes, there figs; in one part you might see pears, in another pomegranates; and, to conclude, no kind of apple or other fruit but there it was to be found but this tree did not live long." Modern grafters will condemn this account as fabulous or exaggerated; but what reason can we have to doubt the authority of a

man, whose life was spent to the benefit of mankind, and whose death was caused by his perseverance in the research after truth in the wonderful works of nature?

Sextus Papinius, it is said, brought two kinds of apples to Rome, in the 21st year of the reign of Augustus Cæsar: the one called Jujubes, out of Syria; the other, Tubercs, he brought from Africa; but their fruit, according to Pliny's account, rather resembled berries than apples.

The Wild Crab is the only apple indigenous to this country; and 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 sowing the seeds and studying the soil, so improved and multiplied the variety 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.

It was not until the 16th year of the reign of Henry the VIIIth, that Pippins were first introduced into England, by Leonard Maschal, who, in Fuller's words,

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brought them from over sea," and planted them at Plumstead, in Sussex, a small village on the north side of the South Downs, near,