There is but one further consideration before beginning the history of the peach as a cultivated fruit. Thomas Andrew Knight and Charles Darwin contended that the peach is a modified almond. This hypothesis would scarcely deserve consideration were it not for the high authority of the men who espoused it--the judgments of a Knight and a Darwin cannot be overlooked. HAS THE PEACH COME FROM THE ALMOND? In the light of evolution every plant has been preceded by another and since the peach and almond have many characters in common, one may have descended from the other. But as to which, if either, is the parent species it would seem idle to speculate with the shreddy and patchy knowledge we now possess of the descent of plants. Yet Thomas Andrew Knight, the greatest horticultural authority of his time and one of the leading experimenters of all time in this field of agriculture, maintained that the peach is a modified almond. His theory received the support of several of the leading English horticulturists of the last century and Darwin gave it credence to the extent of collecting data for its substantiation. Knight believed that the almond and the peach constituted a single species and that by selection under cultivation an almond could ultimately be turned into a peach.[10] He sought proof for his theory in hybridization and on a tree raised from the seed of an almond fertilized by peach-pollen produced a fruit with soft and melting flesh and in all characteristics more like the peach than the almond. This experiment, which in the light of our present knowledge of the laws of inheritance does not in the least illuminate the hypothesis with which Knight started, carried on in the medieval days of plant-breeding, convinced not only Knight in his belief that the peach may be bred from the almond but led others, even down to our own time, to accept the theory. Thus, a writer, presumably Lindley, in _The Gardener's Chronicle_[11] in 1856 says "we are justified in the conclusion that the Almond bears about the same relation to the Peach that the Crab bears to the Cultivated Apple." Later, in the same article, the descent is pictured as follows: "1. Almond became more fleshy--Bad clingstone. 2. Bad clingstone became more fleshy--Good clingstone. 3. Good clingstone became more fleshy--Our soft peaches. 4. Soft peach sported, receding toward the original fleshy type and lost its wool--Nectarine." Another high authority in his time, Thomas Rivers,[12] in 1863, held that peaches, if left to a state of nature would degenerate into thick-fleshed almonds and makes the positive statement that he has "one or two seedling peaches approaching very nearly to that state."