an article of cookery. Even on the continent, where the temperature agrees better with its habits, it has not so much flavour as the love-apple; but still it is used in soups and stews, and also eaten sliced and fried with oil or butter. Though the young plants require to be forwarded in a hot-bed, they may afterwards be made to produce fruit on warm and sheltered borders; and both they and the love-apple succeed best when placed against a sunny wall.

Beside the white egg-plant, (the Solanum melongena of Linnæus,) which has been long cultivated as a curiosity, though never used as food, there are several others; and M. Dunal, in his History of Solanums, has separated the edible ones, of which he has enumerated four varieties, into the species of Solanum esculentum. The round and the long variety of the esculent are both cultivated in the garden of the Horticultural Society. The plants, which are annuals, are raised to the height of nine or ten inches in the stove, and then planted on the borders in the open air, where they grow to the height of between two and three feet. The fruits of both are large : the round, or rather oval (for that is its proper shape), is four inches long and about three thick. This variety is called the Mammoth egg-plant. The long has larger fruit, measuring sometimes as much as eight inches in length. They vary much more in colour than the round, some of them being streaked with yellow. Other varieties are described as being found in India; but the seeds that have been sent to this country have produced fruit similar to the kinds now mentioned.

Various species of the solanum are common in the Levant and three are particularly described by Dr. Walsh in the Horticultural Transactions. The following is the substance of his communication:—

Solanum Ethiopicum is the scarlet egg-plant, of

which the fruit is produced in the neighbourhood of Constantinople; but it is rare, being never sold in the markets, and but seldom seen in private gardens. It is used as an ingredient in soups.

Solanum Sodomeum is a purple egg-plant, of which the fruit is large and handsome. A species of cynips often attacks and punctures the rind; upon which the whole fruit gangrenes, and is converted into a substance like ashes, while the outside is fair and beautiful. It is found on the borders of the Dead Sea, and is that apple, the external beauty and the internal deception of which have been so celebrated in fabulous, and so perplexing in true history.

"Dead-Sea fruits, that tempt the eye,

But turn to ashes on the lips."

The dreadful judgment of the cities of the plain, recorded in sacred history, the desolation around the Dead Sea,the extreme saltness of its waters, the bitumen, and, as is reported, the smoke that sometimes issued from its surface,-were all calculated for making it a fit locality for superstitious terrors; and among the rest were the celebrated apples which are mentioned by Josephus, the historian of the Jews, not as fabulous matters of which he had been told, but as real substances which he had seen

with his own eyes. He says, they "have a fair colour, as if they were fit to be eaten; but if you pluck them with your hand, they vanish into smoke and ashes."

Milton, who collected all of history or fable that could heighten the effect of his poem, refers to those apples as adding new anguish to the fallen angels, after they had been transformed into serpents, upon Satan's return from the temptation of man.

Which grew in Paradise, the bait of Eve,
Us'd by the Tempter: on that prospect strange
Their earnest eyes they fix'd, imagining,

For one forbidden tree, a multitude."

"They, parched with scalding thirst, and hunger fierce,
could not abstain;

But on they rolled in heaps, and up the trees
Climbing, sat thicker than the snaky locks
That curl'd Megara: Greedily they pluck'd
The fruitage fair to sight, like that which grew
Near that bituminous lake where Sodom placed;
This more delusive, not the touch but taste
Deceives; they fondly thinking to allay
Their thirst with gust, instead of fruit

Chew'd bitter ashes, which the offended taste
With sputtering noise rejected."

Henry Teonge, a chaplain in the English fleet, whose Diary was, a few years since, published from the original manuscript, so well describes the real condition of the decayed Solanum Sodomeum, which he states that he saw in December, 1675, that no one can doubt that his notice was founded upon personal examination. "This country (that about the Dead Sea) is altogether unfruitful," says he, "being all over full of stones, which looke just like burnt syndurs. And on some low shrubbs there grow small round things, which are called apples, but no witt like them. They are somewhat fayre to looke at, but touch them and they moulder all to black ashes, like soote, boath for looks and smell." Though these are only the remarks of a popular observer, who told what he saw, without any view to a scientific purpose, the single addition of the attack of the plant by the insect, and the subsequent mortification and internal drying, would have made it just as perfect as the descriptions of the present day.

Pocock, who travelled more than fifty years after Teonge, did not see the apples; and though he did mention them, he pointed to a plant very different

from the real one: "As for the fruits of Sodom, fair without and full of ashes within," says he, "I saw nothing of them: but from the testimony we have, something of the kind has been produced; but I imagine they may be pomegranates, which, having a tough, hard rind, and being left on the trees for two or three years, the inside may be dried, to dust and the outside remain firm." Mariti, who visited those regions thirty years after Pocock, mentions that "No person could point out to me in the neighbourhood that species of fruit called the apples of Sodom, which, being fresh and of a beautiful colour in appearance, fall to dust as soon as they are touched." Hasselquist, however, not only found the apples, but the plant, referred it to the Linnæan species of Solanum melongena, and pointed out the cause of the disease; and though, in the more recent and accurate division of the genus Solanum, to which allusion has been made, the name of Sodomeum has been substituted for that of melongena, the fruit and the disease have been proved to be as Hasselquist stated.

Solanum melongena is more common in the markets of Constantinople than either of the former sorts, being almost as abundant as the gourd and the melon, and used for nearly the same purposes. There are several varieties of this solanum. The first appear. ance of the plant, it is said, is always attended with a north-east wind of some continuance; and, therefore the ships for the Black Sea sail before this harbinger, or rather companion, of bad weather comes forth. This is probably one of the superstitions which in all countries attach to matters so uncertain as the weather.

a. Peach. b. Nectarine. c. Apricot. d. Almond.

THE principal stone fruits that are valued chiefly as fruits, without any reference to their other qualities, are the peach and nectarine, which are only varieties of the same species, the almond, the apricot, the plum, and the cherry. The first belong to the Linnæan genus Amygdalus, and the latter three to that of Prunus.

It seems doubtful whether the Almond, however different it is in its fructification, is not the same species with the peach. The identity of the peach and the nectarine has been fully established. Specimens raised from the stone have not only borne fruit, having on one part of the tree the downy coat of the