As these Indian peaches have cut a prominent figure in furnishing stocks for American peach-orchards, are the source from which came a number of varieties, and, more than all else, gave inspiration for planting permanent orchards of this fruit on American soil, we may well consider them at greater length. _Indian peaches._--In many parts of the South, from the Ohio to the Gulf and from the Atlantic to the Great Plains, the peach is naturalized and has run into many varieties of a peculiar and well-recognized type. This is the "Indian Peach" of this vast region, the chief distinguishing characters of which are: Trees with long, spreading limbs; young growth with purplish bark; small, flat, comparatively persistent leaves; blossoms large; season sometimes covering several weeks; fruit small, streaked with red beneath the skin, giving it a striped appearance, heavily pubescent; flesh usually yellow; ripening very late, season long, and of poor or indifferent quality. The trees of these Indian peaches have a smack of wildness which the best of pruning does not wholly subdue. The aborigines undoubtedly obtained peaches from Spaniards settling in both Mexico and Florida. The first source we have discussed. We come now to the second. No doubt the Spaniards planted peaches in their first settlement of Florida at Saint Augustine in 1565. We have no record of the fact but early Indian traders found the natives of northern Florida and the neighboring states growing peaches in and about their villages in such quantity and with such familiarity as to suggest that the several tribes had long known this fruit. Hilton, an Englishman, who visited Florida a hundred years after the Spaniards established themselves at Saint Augustine, records that: "the country abounds with grapes, large figs and peaches."[96] The besetting sins of our early explorers were hasty generalization and exaggeration, and since the Indian peach, in what is now Florida at any rate, does not "abound" we must believe that Hilton was either farther north or was dissembling. Of the abundance of Indian peaches in the other Gulf States, there can be no doubt, for John Bartram, America's first great botanist, a man of note among all American naturalists, in the account of his travels through this region in 1765-1766 frequently mentions the peach as wild or as having been cultivated by the Indians.