The fruit trees are cultivated for the sake of their fruit. They bear either kernel fruit, when their seed kernels are enclosed in cores of parchment-like formation; or stone fruit, when the seed kernel is enclosed in a hard shell, which is in its turn enclosed in some succulent pulp; or shell fruit, when the fleshy interior is enclosed in a hard shell.
=Almond=, a small tree belonging to the rose family, native to northwest Africa. The flowers are solitary and generally pink, and appear before the lance-shaped leaves. The fruit is egg-shaped, downy externally, with a tough, fibrous covering and a wrinkled stone. It has long been widely cultivated, and many varieties exist, differing in the hardness of the stone and in the flavor of the seed. SWEET ALMONDS include the large thin-shelled Jordan (from the French _jardin_), the Valencia almond, imported as a dessert fruit from Malaga, the smaller Barbary and Italian forms, and the California product. The BITTER ALMOND yields an essential oil, employed in confectionery, but dangerous from sometimes containing prussic acid.
=Apple= (_Pyrus Malus_), grows wild in forests, but it is found artificially improved everywhere in gardens and orchards. Its bark is generally smooth; its wood somewhat soft; its leaves oval-shaped and about double the length of their stalks; its blossoms are white with reddish margins. Fruit horticulture has produced many species of apples in the course of time, and they are now the most important fruit of the temperate zone, area of production, consumption, and variety of product being considered, ranking with the grape, olive, orange, lemon and banana, among the six leading fruits of the world. North America is preëminently the leading apple growing region. In the United States, New York, Pennsylvania, and Ohio produce about one-third of the total crop.
The cultivation of the apple is prehistoric. Abundantly used by Lake Dwellers of the Stone Age in Italy and Switzerland.
Each pod contains some sixty seeds, arranged in five or eight rows (mostly five); the seeds are white when they are fresh, but brown and covered with a fragile skin or shell when dried. These seeds, which are not unlike beans or almonds, are imbedded in a mass of mucilaginous pulp, of a sweet but acid taste. The seeds only require to be extracted, cured and dried, to become the cacao-beans of commerce.]