“The facility,” I said, “with which our peach trees are multiplied from seed in America, and have produced fleshy fruits, sometimes very fine ones, without the resource of grafting, inclines me to think that the species is in a natural state, little changed by a long cultivation or by hybrid fertilization. In Virginia and the neighbouring states there are peaches grown on trees raised from seed and not grafted, and their abundance is so great that brandy is made from them.[1129] On some trees the fruit is magnificent.[1130] At Juan Fernandez, says Bertero,[1131] the peach tree is so abundant that it is impossible to form an idea of the quantity of fruit which is gathered; it is usually very good, although the trees have reverted to a wild condition. From these instances it would not be surprising if the wild peaches with indifferent fruit found in Western Asia were simply naturalized trees in a climate not wholly favourable, and that the species was of Chinese origin, where its cultivation seems most ancient.” Dr. Bretschneider,[1132] who at Pekin has access to all the resources of Chinese literature, merely says, after reading the above passages, “_Tao_ is the peach tree. De Candolle thinks that China is the native country of the peach. He may be right.” The antiquity of the existence of the species and its wild nature in Western Asia have become more doubtful since 1855. Anglo-Indian botanists speak of the peach solely as a cultivated tree,[1133] or as cultivated and becoming naturalized and apparently wild in the north-west of India.[1134] Boissier[1135] mentions specimens gathered in Ghilan and to the south of the Caucasus, but he says nothing as to their wild nature; and Karl Koch,[1136] after travelling through this district, says, speaking of the peach, “Country unknown, perhaps Persia. Boissier saw trees growing in the gorges on Mount Hymettus, near Athens.” The peach spreads easily in the countries in which it is cultivated, so that it is hard to say whether a given tree is of natural origin and anterior to cultivation, or whether it is naturalized. But it certainly was first cultivated in China; it was spoken of there two thousand years before its introduction into the Greco-Roman world, a thousand years perhaps before its introduction into the lands of the Sanskrit-speaking race. The group of peaches (genus or subgenus) is composed of five forms, which Decaisne[1137] regards as species, but which other botanists are inclined to call varieties. The one is the common peach; the second the nectarine, which we know to be derived; the third is the flattened peach (_P. platycarpa_, Decaisne) cultivated in China; and the two last are indigenous in China (_P. simonii_, Decaisne, and _P. Davidii_, Carrière). It is, therefore, essentially a Chinese group.