“I have sought in vain for a proof that the nectarine existed in Italy in the time of ancient Rome. Pliny,[1123] who confounds in his compilation peaches, plums, the _Laurus Persea_,[1124] and perhaps other trees, says nothing which can apply to such a fruit. Sometimes people have thought they recognized it in the _tuberes_ of which he speaks. It was a tree imported from Syria in the time of Augustus. There were both red and white tuberes. Others (_tuberes?_ or _mala?_) of the neighbourhood of Verona were downy. Some graceful verses of Petronus, quoted by Dalechamp,[1125] clearly prove that the _tuberes_ of the Romans in Nero’s time were a smooth-skinned fruit; but this might be the jujube (_Zizyphus_), _Diospyros_, or some _Cratægus_, just as well as the smooth-skinned peach. Each author in the time of the Renaissance had his opinion on this point, or criticized that of the others.[1126] Perhaps there were two or three species of _tuberes_, as Pliny says, and one of them which was grafted on plum trees was the nectarine (?)[1127] but I doubt whether this question can ever be cleared up.[1128] “Even admitting that the _Nucipersica_ was only introduced into Europe in the Middle Ages, we cannot help remarking that in European gardens for centuries, and in Japan from time unknown, there was an intermixture of all the principal kinds of peach. It seems that its different qualities were produced everywhere from a primitive species, which was probably the downy peach. If the two kinds had existed from the beginning, either they would have been in different countries, and their cultivation would have been established separately, or they would have been in the same country, and in this case it is probable that one kind would have been anciently introduced into this country and the other into that.” I laid stress, in 1855, on other considerations in support of the theory that the nectarine is derived from the common peach; but Darwin has given such a large number of cases in which a branch of nectarine has unexpectedly appeared upon a peach tree, that it is useless to insist longer upon this point, and I will only add that the nectarine has every appearance of an artificial tree. Not only is it not found wild, but it never becomes naturalized, and each tree lives for a shorter time than the common peach. It is, in fact, a weakened form.