The reader will now ask me about the water-core apples, so much sought and prized by youngsters. The water-core is not characteristic of a variety, although occurring in some varieties more frequently than in others. It is a physiological condition, supposed to be associated with a relatively low transpiration (evaporation) so that excess water is held in the fruit. In certain seasons this condition is marked, and also in cloudy regions and often on young trees that have an over-supply of moisture. Yet such cores occur in old trees and sometimes with more or less regularity. What the physiological inability may be in such cases to dispose of excess moisture appears to be undetermined. Now and then one finds a double apple, with two fruits grown solidly together, two blossom ends and a single stem. A seedling tree I knew as a boy bore such apples frequently, sometimes a score of them among the crop of the year. This, of course, is a malformation or teratological state. Apparently two flowers coalesce to form these fruits. On the tree of which I speak, the two fruits were about equal in size, making a large, widened, edible apple, but I have known of other cases in which a diminutive undeveloped fruit is attached to the side of a normal one. Perhaps the oddest of them all is the "Bloomless apple." It is said to have no flowers. In fact, however, the flowers are present but they lack showy petals and are therefore not conspicuous. The bloomless apple is a monstrous state, the cause of which is unknown. Now and then a tree is reported. It was described at least as long ago as 1768, and in 1770 Muenchhausen called it _Pyrus apetala_ (the petalless pyrus). The flowers have no stamens, and apparently they are pollinated from any other apples in the vicinity. In 1785, Moench described it as _Pyrus dioica_ (the dioecious pyrus, sexes separated on different plants). The ovary is also malformed, having six or seven and sometimes probably more cells, and bearing ten to fifteen styles. The resulting fruit has a core character unknown in other apples but approached in certain apple-like fruits, as the medlar. The fruit has a hole or opening from the calyx (which is open) into the core; and the core is roughly double, one series above the other. The fruit, in such specimens as I have seen or read about, has no horticultural merit; but it is a curiosity of great botanical interest. It appears now and then in widely separated places, the trees probably having originated as chance seedlings. The fruits from the different originations are not always the same in size and form, but the flowers apparently all have the same malformed character.