So high an estimate did Pliny have of this fruit, that he asserted that "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 will immortalize their first grafters forever; such as took their names from Manlius, Cestius, Matius, and Claudius."--Of the Quince apple, he says, that came of a quince being grafted upon the apple stock, which "smell like the quince, and were called _Appiana_, after Appius, who was the first that practiced this mode of grafting. Some are so red that they resemble blood, which is caused by their being grafted upon the mulberry stock. Of all the apples, the one which took its name from Petisius, was the most excellent for eating, both on account of its sweetness and its agreeable flavor." Pliny mentions twenty-nine kinds of apples cultivated in Italy, about the commencement of the Christian Era.[7] Alas! for human vanity and apple glory! Where are now these boasted sorts, upon whose merits the immortality of their inventors and first grafters was to depend? They have disappeared from our lists to give place to new favorites, to some of which, perhaps, we are disposed to award an equally high meed of praise, that will again be ignored in a few fleeting years, when higher skill and more scientific applications of knowledge shall have produced superior fruit to any of those we now prize so highly; and this is a consummation to which we may all look forward with pleasure. In this country the large majority of our favorite fruits, of whatever species or kind, seem to have originated by accident, that is, they have been discovered in seedling orchards, or even in hedge-rows. These have no doubt, however, been produced by accidental crosses of good kinds, and this may occur through the intervention of insects in any orchard of good fruit, where there may chance to be some varieties that have the tendency to progress. The discoveries of Linnæus, and his doctrine of the sexual characters of plants, created quite a revolution in botany, and no doubt attracted the attention of Lord Bacon, who was a close observer of nature, for he ventured to guess that there might be such a thing as crossing the breeds of plants, when he says:--"The compounding or mixture of kinds in plants is not found out, which, nevertheless, if it be possible, is more at command than that of living creatures; wherefore it were one of the most noteable experiments touching plants to find it out, for so you may have great variety of new fruits and flowers yet unknown. Grafting does it not, that mendeth the fruit or doubleth the flowers, etc., but hath not the power to make a new kind, for the scion ever overruleth the stock." In which last observation he shows more knowledge and a deeper insight into the hidden mysteries of plant-life than many a man in our day, whose special business it is to watch, nurse, and care for these humble forms of existence.