FRUITS, with regard to commerce, are distinguished into recent, fresh, and dry.
Recent Fruits are those sold just as they are gathered from the tree, without any farther preparation; in which state most of the productions of our gardens and orchards are sold by fruiterers.
Dry Fruits are those dried in the sun, or by the fire, with other ingredients sometimes added to them to preserve them from decay. They are imported chiefly from foreign countries, and consist of raisins, currants, figs, capers, olives, cloves, nutmegs, pepper, and other spices.
Under the denomination of dry fruits are also frequently included apples, pears, almonds, filberts, &c.
Fruit-Flies, a name given to a species of small black flies found in vast numbers among fruit-trees in the spring season, and supposed to do great injury to them.
Fruit-Stones. Much mischief arises from the custom which some people have of swallowing the stones of plums and other fruit. In the Philosophical Transactions there is an account of a woman who suffered violent pains in her bowels once a month during thirty years on this account. At length a strong purgative was administered to her, which drove down the cause of all these complaints from the bowels to the anus, where it gave a sensation of distension and stoppage, producing a continual desire to go to stool, but without voiding any thing. There was at last extracted from her intestines with forceps a ball of an oval figure, of about ten drachms in weight, and measuring five inches in circumference. This had caused the violent fits of pain which she had suffered for so many years; and after getting rid of it she perfectly recovered. The ball looked like a stone, and felt very hard; but it floated in water. On cutting it through with a knife, a plum-stone was found in the centre of it, round which several coats of this hard and tough matter had gathered. Another instance, given in the same papers, is of a man who died of an incurable colic, which had tormented him many years, and baffled the effects of medicines. He was opened after death, and in his bowels there was found a ball similar to that above mentioned, but somewhat larger, being six inches in circumference, and weighing an ounce and a half. In the centre of this, as in the case of the other, there was found the stone of a common plum, and the coats were of the same nature as those before noticed.
These, and several other instances mentioned in the same place, sufficiently show the absurdity of the notion that the stones of fruits are wholesome; for though by nature the guts are so defended by their proper mucus, that people very seldom suffer by things of this kind, yet if we consider the various circumvolutions of the guts, their valves and cells, and at the same time consider the hair of the skins of animals we feed on, the wool or down on herbs and fruit, and the fibres, vessels, and nerves of
plants, which are not altered by the stomach, it seems surprising that instances of this kind of mischief are not much more common than they are. Cherry-stones, swallowed in great quantities, have occasioned numerous deaths; and there have been instances even of the seeds of strawberries collecting into a lump in the guts, and causing violent disorders, which could not be cured without great difficulty.
Fruit-Trees. See HORTICULTURE.