The characters given in the foregoing description are those of the cultivated peach--the consummate fruit of _Prunus persica_. The generic name, Prunus, is the ancient Latin name of the plum, _Prunus domestica_, the type species. The specific name, _persica_, commemorates the old belief that the peach came from Persia. The common name, peach, in English, as in most European languages, is a derivative from _persica_. Amygdalus, found several times in the synonomy, is the Syrian name of the almond. The drupe-fruits are put in two, three and sometimes four genera by various botanists but in the fruit-books issued by this Station, following most botanists and pomologists, all are put in a single genus, Prunus. Such lumping of several distinct fruits into one genus has its disadvantages but the several fruits cannot be reasonably separated because outliers closely connect all. Hybridization between the cultivated stone-fruits adds to the perplexities of classification. _Prunus persica_ is variously divided by botanists and pomologists. Quite commonly two botanical varieties of edible peaches are split off, as shown in the synonomy, to separate the nectarine and the flat peaches from the pubescent and globular peaches. But these sub-species, originating over and over in the case of the nectarine as a bud or seed-mutation and the flat peaches probably having originated as a mutation, are not more distinct from the parent species than the red-fleshed sorts, the snowball peaches, the Yellow Transvaals from South Africa, the nippled peach, the cleft peach, the beaked peach, the winter peaches of China, or the pot-grown dwarfs from China; in fact, are not more different from other peaches than a clingstone is from a freestone, a yellow flesh from a white flesh or a large-flowered from a small-flowered sort. All constitute merely pomological groups, which, more and more, are becoming interminably confused by hybridization. [Illustration: ALTON (Large Flowered)] [Illustration: BLOOD LEAF] We name but one sub-species of _Prunus persica_, and that doubtful. Mr. Frank N. Meyer of the United States Department of Agriculture has recently introduced into the United States cuttings of a wild peach from the province of Kansu, China, which he thinks has horticultural value. The peach is _Prunus persica potanini_ Batalin (_Act. Hort. Petrop._ =12=:164. 1892) which Mr. Meyer describes as follows:[168]