The peach is profoundly influenced by soil, climate and culture, and a discussion of its status is not complete without taking full account of the environment in which it is growing. For this reason, chiefly, the peach-regions and peach-growing in New York are discussed as fully as space permits. This part of the book is designed, also, to serve the prospective peach-planter in this State in the selection of locations and soils and in the culture of the peach. Since the cultivation of any plant changes from year to year, though, experiment station bulletins and circulars and treatises on the culture of the peach should supply growers of this fruit with better information on the year-to-year management of the peach-plantation. The botany of the peach, as compared with its congeners, the plum and the cherry, is simple, indeed, and is well agreed upon by botanical writers, so that this book may be said to be almost wholly a horticultural one. Yet the few pages devoted to the botany of the peach may make plainer, to the horticulturist at least, the botany of this fruit. The chief contribution _The Peaches of New York_ makes to pomology is in the descriptions of varieties it contains. All who grow or use peaches are dependent on descriptions of fruit and tree for the identification of varieties. From a well-written description one should get an exact mental picture of the fruit--we try to present such a pen-picture. With a few exceptions the descriptions of major varieties have been made from peaches growing on the Station grounds, though in many cases fruits from several localities have been compared with those grown at home. The fruits, it must be said at once, have been described with other ends in view than identification. Chief of these is the effort to set forth the elementary characters, or unit-characters, of the peach. It is now certain that the characters of plants are independent entities thrown into various relationships with each other in individual plants. On this conception of unit-characters the improvement of plants is founded. An important part of the work in describing fruits has been to discover what seem to be unit-characters in peaches, thereby aiding in building a foundation in breeding peaches. To improve the peach we must combine the characters of species and varieties; we must know what these are before we can rearrange them in an improved peach. In the marked attention paid to the improvement of plants, following the work of Mendel and others, the peach is bound to receive consideration. Never was information more needed in regard to the processes that have brought peaches from their primitive condition to their present perfection. We have done our utmost to give all that could be learned of the origin and history of varieties with the hope that such knowledge may be helpful to those who are trying to improve the peach.