(12.) Among the peaches the palm must be awarded to the duracinus:[1766] the Gallic and the Asiatic peach are distinguished respectively by the names of the countries of their origin. They ripen at the end of autumn, though some of the early[1767] kinds are ripe in the summer. It is only within the last thirty years that these last have been introduced; originally they were sold at the price of a denarius a piece. Those known as the “supernatia”[1768] come from the country of the Sabines, but the “popularia” grow everywhere. This is a very harmless fruit, and a particular favourite with invalids: some, in fact, have sold before this as high as thirty sesterces apiece, a price that has never been exceeded by any other fruit. This, too, is the more to be wondered at, as there is none that is a worse keeper: for, when it is once plucked, the longest time that it will keep is a couple of days; and so sold it must be, fetch what it may. CHAP. 12. (13).—TWELVE KINDS OF PLUMS. Next comes a vast number of varieties of the plum, the parti-coloured, the black,[1769] the white,[1770] the barley[1771] plum—so called, because it is ripe at barley-harvest—and another of the same colour as the last, but which ripens later, and is of a larger size, generally known as the “asinina,”[1772] from the little esteem in which it is held. There are the onychina, too, the cerina,[1773]—more esteemed, and the purple[1774] plum: the Armenian,[1775] also an exotic from foreign parts, the only one among the plums that recommends itself by its smell. The plum-tree grafted on the nut exhibits what we may call a piece of impudence quite its own, for it produces a fruit that has all the appearance of the parent stock, together with the juice of the adopted fruit: in consequence of its being thus compounded of both, it is known by the name of “nuci-pruna.”[1776] Nut-prunes, as well as the peach, the wild plum,[1777] and the cerina, are often put in casks, and so kept till the crop comes of the following year. All the other varieties ripen with the greatest rapidity, and pass off just as quickly. More recently, in Bætica, they have begun to introduce what they call “malina,” or the fruit of the plum engrafted on the apple-tree,[1778] and “amygdalina,” the fruit of the plum engrafted on the almond-tree,[1779] the kernel found in the stone of these last being that of the almond;[1780] indeed, there is no specimen in which two fruits have been more ingeniously combined in one.