Kalm[125] also gives an account of the colonists' method of making peach-brandy, which, as we have seen, plays so important a part in the peach-industry of the times. Brandy-making, according to Kalm, was simplicity itself and it is not to be wondered that in those days of strong drink peach-brandy was popular. The following is Kalm's description: "They make brandy from peaches here, after the following method. The fruit is cut asunder, and the stones are taken out. The pieces of fruit are then put into a vessel, where they are left for three weeks or a month, till they are quite putrid. They are then put into the distilling vessel, and the brandy is made and afterwards distilled over again. This brandy is not for people who have a more refined taste, but it is only for the common kind of people, such as workmen and the like." Kalm, travelling from Trenton to Princeton, found the country thickly settled and full of orchards:[126] "During the greater part of the day we had very extensive corn fields on both sides of the road. * * * Near almost every farm was a spacious orchard full of peach and apple trees, and in some of them the fruit had fallen from the trees in such quantities as to cover nearly the whole surface. Part of it they left to rot, because they could not take it all in and consume it. Wherever we passed by we were always welcome to go into the fine orchards and gather our hats and pockets full of the choicest fruit, without the possessors so much as looking after it." The soil and climate of Long Island and the lower reaches of the Hudson, similar to those of the Chesapeake peach-belt, are so well adapted to peaches that we may be sure that the early settlers in New York eked out their scanty fare with this fruit soon after settlements were made. Trade with the colonies to the south, where peaches were common before the Dutch were established on Manhattan Island, began almost immediately after the arrival of the Hollanders in America, and knowledge of the adaptability of peaches to conditions in the New World was no doubt quickly acquired from Virginia, if, indeed, the aborigines were not cultivating this fruit in the region as Penn found them doing on the site of Philadelphia. Yet careful search in the colonial records of New York shows no early accounts of peaches, there being few such accounts, by the way, of any agricultural product, no one having undertaken the task of describing the natural and agricultural resources of this State as was done by several able observers for Virginia and the New England states.