As was true of grapes, our fathers first endeavored to supply their gardens from foreign nurseries, neglecting the wild species with which our woods and roadsides abounded.  The raspberry of Europe (Rubus idaeus) has been developed, and in many instances enfeebled, by ages of cultivation.  Nevertheless, few other fruits have shown equal power to adapt themselves to our soil and climate, and we have obtained from foreign sources many valuable kinds—­as, for instance, the Antwerp, which for weeks together annually taxed the carrying power of Hudson River steamers.  In quality these foreign kinds have never been surpassed; but almost invariably they have proved tender and fastidious, thriving well in some localities, and failing utterly (except under the most skilful care) in others.  The frosts of the North killed them in winter, and Southern suns shrivelled their foliage in summer.  Therefore they were not raspberries for the million, but for those who resided in favored regions, and were willing to bestow upon them much care and high culture.

Eventually another process began, taking place either by chance or under the skilful manipulation of the gardener—­that of hybridizing, or crossing these foreign varieties with our hardier native species.  The best results have been attained more frequently, I think, by chance; that is, the bees, which get more honey from the raspberry than from most other plants, carried the pollen from a native flower to the blossom of the garden exotic.  The seeds of the fruit eventually produced were endowed with characteristics of both the foreign and native strains.  Occasionally these seeds fell where they had a chance to grow, and so produced a fortuitous seedling plant which soon matured into a bearing bush, differing from, both of its parents, and not infrequently surpassing both in good qualities.  Some one horticulturally inclined having observed the unusually fine fruit on the chance plant, and believing that it is a good plan to help the fittest to survive, marked the bush, and in the autumn transferred it to his garden.  It speedily propagated itself by suckers, or young sprouts from the roots, and he had plants to sell or give away.  Such, I believe, was the history of the Cuthbert—­named after the gentleman who found it, and now probably the favorite raspberry of America.

Thus fortuitously, or by the skill of the gardener, the foreign and our native species were crossed, and a new and hardier class of varieties obtained.  The large size and richness in flavor of the European berry has been bred into and combined with our smaller and more insipid indigenous fruit.  By this process the area of successful raspberry culture has been extended almost indefinitely.