s must have been very crude fruits measured by the
produce of the present day. But other food was crude and man was
crude. The North American Indians found the apple to be worth their
effort; remains of some of the so-called Indian orchards of the Five
Nations in New York persisted until the present generation. These were
seedling apple-trees, grown from the stocks introduced by the white
man. The French missionaries are said to have carried the apple far
into the interior, and early settlers took seeds with them. The
legends and records of Johnny Appleseed, sowing the seeds as he went,
are still familiar. My father, like other pioneers, took seeds from
the old New England trees into the wilderness of the West; the
resulting trees were top-grafted, some of them as late as my time; I
can remember the apples some of these seedling trees bore, the like of
which I have never seen again, probably poor apples if we had them in
this day but to a boy at the edge of the forest the very essence of
goodness. As early as 1639, apples had been picked from trees planted
on Governor's Island in Boston harbor. Governor John Endicott of
Massachusetts Colony had an apple-tree nursery in the early day; in
1644 he says that five hundred of his trees were destroyed by fire.
So the apple came early to be a standby on the new continent.

The apples of the colonists were not all for eating, but for drinking.
The butts and barrels of cider put in cellars in the early times seem
to us most surprising. Herein are suggestions of old social customs
that might lead us into interesting historical excursions. The oldest
book I possess on the apple is "Vinetum Britannicum: or, a Treatise of
Cider," published in London in 1676; it treats also of other beverages
made from fruits and of "the newly-invented ingenio or mill, for the
more expeditious and better making of cider." The gradual change in
customs, whereby the eating of the apple (rather than the drinking of
it) has come to be paramount, is a significant development; the use of
apple-juice may now proceed on another basis, on the principle of
preservation and pasteurization rather than of fermentation.

It is the custom to call the apple _Pyrus Malus_. This is the name
given by the great Linnaeus, with whom the modern accurate naming of
plants and animals begins. The nomenclature of plants starts with his
"Species Plantarum," 1753. Pyrus is the genus or group comprising the
pears and apples, and