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WHENCE COMES THE APPLE-TREE?
If the dwarf apple-tree goes back to the Middle Ages and perhaps farther, then whence comes the apple originally? No one can surely answer. Carbonized apples are found in the remains of the prehistoric lake dwellings of Switzerland. When recorded history begins, apples were well known and widely distributed. The apple-tree is wild in many parts of Europe, but it is difficult to determine whether, in a given region, it is indigenous or has run wild from cultivation. Wild apple-trees are common in North America, but no one supposes that the orchard apple is native here.
Expert opinion generally considers that the apple is native in the region of the Caspian Sea and probably in southeastern Europe. Perhaps it had spread westward before the Aryan migrations. It had also probably spread eastward, but it is not a cultivated fruit in China and Japan except apparently as introduced in recent time. The apple is essentially a fruit of central and northern Europe, and of European migration and settlement.
It is a fertile retrospect to conceive of the apple as an attendant of the course of Western civilization. Without voice and leaving no record, it has nevertheless followed man in his wanderings, encouraged his attainment of permanent habitations, succored him in his emergencies. What the apple has contributed to sustenance can never be known, but we are aware that it yields its fruit abundantly, that it thrives in widely unlike regions and conditions, that the tree has the ruggedness to endure severe climates and to provide food that can be stored and transported. In the ages it must have stood guard at many a rude camp and fireside. It would be fascinating to know what the apple-tree has witnessed.
These early apples 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 Linnaeus included the quince; Malus is Latin for the apple-tree. Together the names represent genus and species,—the malus Pyrus.