abundantly compared with the sorts now in
cultivation; but Mr. Knight's experiments
led to the production of a race, of which the
British Queen was the great example, and of
which that called the Princess Alice Maude
is another form.

The sorts of strawberries are numerous
now, and it cannot be said that the worst of
them is bad—unless they go blind and
sterile, as some of the hautbois do; in which
case they are null and void, without
appreciable qualities. You cannot state that a
thing which is not, is either grateful or
unpleasant to the taste. The price of
strawberries varies greatly. Novelties always
come out at a high figure. Thus, there is
the Wonderful strawberry, raised by J.
Jeyes, nurseryman, Northampton, price one
guinea per hundred, stated to ripen a week
later than the British Queen, and to produce
fruit in such abundance that it is necessary
to place a stick near the centre of each plant,
and from it to support the long clusters of fruit
from covering the surrounding ground. A most
meritorious characteristic that, if the
strawberry stands the proof of the eating. [N.B.
There is a new scarlet geranium, Wonderful,
also. Tyros, who want a plentiful dessert,
will take care not to order plants which,
instead of fruit, will only produce magnificent
bouquets.] As a contrast in respect to
saleable value, there is Kitley's Goliath—it
should have been Goliath's Head, because it
is round, big, and (calumniators say) a little
inclined to be woolly, like the rest of its
kindred—offered for the reasonable price of
one pound per thousand plants.

Tastes differ in regard to strawberries, as
with everything else. The palatable properties
of wood or wild strawberries have been,
it seems to me, estimated rather poetically.
Of those in cultivation many are so excellent
as to make you regret they should be so
transitory. You have a few days' glut, and
then they are over. Fastidious fruit judges
are apt to find fault with the Chilias in
general as deficient in flavour, as incurably
woolly, watery, and insipid; I, the scribe,
accept them gratefully when thoroughly
ripened with plenty of sun. Wilmot's
Superb, though slightly esteemed by professional
horticulturists, has nevertheless great
family merits; it is of enormous size, looks
handsome on the dish, and fills the mouth of
little people with a large lump of wholesome
bread fruit. The scribe's gardens—not to
crack too loud, they are two, of modest
dimensions—contain some five or six-and-twenty
kinds, such as Nicholson's Ajax, Captain
Cook, Fill Basket, and Ruby; Swainston's
Seedling, Hooper's ditto; Pelvilain's Comte
de Paris; Haquin's Liegeoise; Myatt's Globe
and Prolific Hautbois; Trollope's Victoria;
the Magnificent; and, of course,—of course,
three times of course,—the Black Prince, the
British Queen, and the Elton Pine. Besides
these, there exist other very desirable
varieties too numerous to mention. Sir
Harry is a novelty which is astonishing the
world with its voluminous presence. As
curiosities, there are the single-leaved, the
five-leaved, and the variegated-leaved
strawberries. One or two seedlings, which are not
yet out, raised by Mr. Nicholson and by Mr.
Cuthill himself, appear likely to contest the
palm of earliness with Cuthill's well-known
Black Prince, which is occasionally gathered
ripe, in the open ground, by the end of
May.

A great English naturalist, who has left
behind him standard works, amused the last
years of his amiable and useful life by the
study of cultivated fruits. One day, he pulled
from his pocket three beautiful apples and
laid them out before me on the table. I
thought they were meant as a friendly offering,
and was about to thank him for the same;
but he anticipated the coming speech, and
undeceived me.

"This," he said,"is for to-day; this for
to-morrow, and that for next day. Every
day, at dessert, I learn one variety of apple
that is new to me. I first observe its outside
complexion; I then cut it in halves
perpendicularly from the crown to the stalk, and I
make a tracing of the outline of the section,
which gives me a correct profile likeness;
and, lastly, I eat it, which determines the
flavour. I only eat one apple a day, for fear
of confounding the different varieties in my
memory."

Just so, at the present season, you, my
reader, may undertake a course of
strawberries. It would be as well if you could
get a leaf of each sort to accompany the
lesson contained in the plate. Covent Garden,
will supply specimens, early and late,
numerous and true. You will make the
acquaintance of the Roseberry and the Bath
scarlet, of that lucky accident Keen's
seedling, of—but you will find a succession of
flavours much more entertaining than a
succession of names.

Good gardeners have drawn up carefully
selected lists comprising sundry varieties of
strawberries, by growing which you may
count upon a constant succession of fruit for
six weeks or a couple of months. Such guiding
help is doubtless acceptable in its way, and
good as far as it goes; but it is only a
half-measure, or a quarter-measure. It does not
attempt to supply the thing really wanted,
namely, new sorts of strawberries of a class
totally different to those now in repute and
general cultivation.

The horticultural world should do for
strawberries what it has done for roses. Remember
the roses of our great-grandmothers' days.
There was the hundred-leaved or cabbage,
the yellow cabbage, the pompone or rose de
Meaux, the Burgundy or crimson pompone,
the doctor's rose, the rosamundi or striped
doctor's rose, and a few others. Some of
these were, and still are, very beautiful; but