By the end of the first hundred years in America the English seem to have brought orcharding to a fine state of perfection in Virginia, the peach succeeding then, by all accounts, rather better than now. Bruce[114] gives an admirable summing-up of orchard-conditions at the end of the period named: "In the closing years of the seventeenth century, there were few plantations in Virginia which did not possess orchards of apple and peach trees, pear, plum, apricot, and quince. The number of trees was often very large. The orchard of Robert Hide of York contained three hundred peach and three hundred apple trees. There were twenty-five hundred apple trees in the orchard of Colonel Fitzhugh. Each species of fruit was represented by many varieties; thus, of the apple, there were mains, pippins, russentens, costards, marigolds, kings, magitens and batchelors; of the pear, bergamy and warden. The quince was greater in size, but less aciduated than the English quince; on the other hand, the apricot and plum were inferior in quality to the English, not ripening in the same perfection. Cherries grew in notable abundance. So great was the productive capacity of the peach that some of the landowners planted orchards of the tree for the mere purpose of using the fruit to fatten their hogs; on some plantations, as many as forty bushels are said to have been knocked down to the swine in the course of a single season." Treasure after treasure of experience and narrative may be found in tracing the history of the peach in Virginia but space permits only the references that best illuminate the development and culture of this fruit in America. Two accounts must serve to give an idea of the peach in Virginia in the Eighteenth Century. Robert Beverly, in his _History of Virginia_ gives a good idea of the culture, kinds and uses of peaches in the early part of the Eighteenth Century:[115] "Peaches, nectarines and apricots, as well as plumbs and cherries, grow there upon standard trees. They commonly bear in three years from the stone, and thrive so exceedingly, that they seem to have no need of grafting or inoculating, if any body would be so good a husband; and truly I never heard of any that did graft either plum, nectarine, peach or apricot in that country, before the first edition of this book." "Peaches and nectarines I believe to be spontaneous, somewhere or other on that continent, for the Indians have, and ever had greater variety, and finer sorts of them than the English. The best sort of these cling to the stone, and will not come off clear, which they call plum nectarines, and plum peaches or clint stones. Some of these are twelve or thirteen inches in the girt. These sorts of fruits are raised so easily there, that some good husbands plant great orchards of them, purposely for their hogs; and others make a drink of them, which they call mobby, and either drink it as cider, or distill it off for brandy. This makes the best spirit next to grapes."