The succession of forest trees Author:Henry David Thoreau Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: WILD APPLES. THE HISTORY OF THE APPLE-TREE. It is remarkable how closely the history of the Apple-tree is connected with that of man. The geologist tells u... more »s that the order of the Hosacece, which includes the Apple, also the true Grasses, and the Labiatce, or Mints, were introduced only a short time previous to the appearance of man on the globe. It appears that apples made a part of the food of that unknown primitive people whose traces have lately been found at the bottom of the Swiss lakes, supposed to be older than the foundation of Rome, so old that they had no metallic implements. An entire black and shrivelled Crab-Apple has been recovered from their stores. Tacitus says of the ancient Germans, that they satisfied their hunger with wild apples, among other things. Niebuhr1 observes that " the words for a house, a field, a plough, ploughing, wine, oil, milk, sheep, apples, and others relating to agriculture and the gentler ways of life, agree in Latin and Greek, while the Latin words for all objects pertaining to war or the chase are utterly alien from the Greek." Thus 1 A German historical critic of ancient life. the apple-tree may be considered a symbol of peace no less than the olive. The apple was early so important, and so generally distributed, that its name traced to its root in many languages signifies fruit in general. MrjXov [Melon], in Greek, means an apple, also the fruit of other trees, also a sheep and any cattle, and finally riches in general. The apple-tree has been celebrated'by the Hebrews, Greeks, Romans, and Scandinavians. Some have thought that the first human pair were tempted by its fruit. Goddesses are fabled to have contended for it, dragons were set to watch it, and heroes were employed to pluck it.1 The tree is mentioned i...« less