The capacity of species to split into types, using types in a broad sense, is, we all agree, one of the greatest assets of cultivated plants. Through diversity of types come adaptabilities to soils and climates and variety in the crop, to mention but two of the essentials of standard crop-plants. New types afford the material from which greatest progress comes in fruit-growing. In common with all fruit-growing, peach-growing has received impetus from time to time from the introduction of new and distinct types. In the middle of the Nineteenth Century, three previously unknown types of peaches, each divisible into horticultural varieties, were brought to America. All three have had important effects on the peach-industry in America. _North China peaches._--Not very distinct from the Persian peaches at the outset, its outliers running into some of the other groups as well, "North China" is now but little more than a name for a conglomerate lot of varieties grown everywhere in America except in the sub-tropic parts of the Gulf States. The North China race includes varieties characterized by fruits of large size, great beauty, tender skin and flesh, good quality and vigorous trees which bear abundantly and regularly. The group has received careful study at the Delaware Experiment Station, an account of it by G. Harold Powell having been published in the Thirteenth Annual Report from that Station in 1901. Powell prefers to call the group Chinese Cling rather than North China. The peaches put in the North China group are so nearly akin to those in the Persian group that it is difficult to place varieties. All agree, however, in taking the European Shanghai, the American Chinese Cling, as the type-variety and, though it is probable that travelers or missionaries brought pits of some of these peaches from northern China a century or more ago, the known history of the group begins with the variety just named as the type. It is a pleasure to give Robert Fortune, the indefatigable collector of Chinese plants for the London Horticultural Society, credit for introducing these peaches into western countries. In 1844 Fortune collected a fine, large, delicious peach near Shanghai and in the autumn forwarded pits and a plant in a pot to London. The pits were sown and the seedlings produced fruit in 1852 and from among these a sort was selected and called Shanghai.[201] Pits from this first collection were probably sent to France, for the name appears in the early fifties in the pomological literature of this country.