Apricot
2 of the 6 encyclopedias on this shelf carry an entry for Apricot. Both are reproduced below, so you can see where they agree and where they differ.
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
a fine fruit half way between a plum and a peach. A native of Armenia, or, as some say, of Japan. The apricot is fond of the sun, and in Europe is trained frequently against stone walls. It blooms early, before its leaves come out, and the fruit ripens earlier than peaches or plums. For this reason the apricot is liable to suffer from early frosts. Otherwise it is as hardy as the peach, and may be raised under similar conditions. Its chief enemy is the curculio, the same insect that attacks the plum and the peach. This insect must be caught on canvas by jarring the tree, and burned. The apricot is grown very generally in peach regions. It is one of the leading fruits of California, where it was introduced at the Spanish missions as early as 1792. The interior valleys of this state now shelter 3,000,000 trees and ship out as high as 30,000,000 pounds of dried apricots, 9,000,000 cases of canned apricots, and well on toward 200 cars of fresh apricots in four-pound crated baskets in a single season. Apricots are raised from the seed. The young plant is grafted during the second summer. Apricot grafts are set also on plum and peach seedlings. The apricot is a rapid grower. The shoots require thinning out, and it is usually necessary to remove a large part of the young fruit to secure the best results. See Grafting
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
a fruit, that of the prunus armeniaca; also the tree on which it grows. It is wild in Africa and in the Caucasus, and also in China and some other countries. It is esteemed only second to the peach.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
Both entries hedge on origin — Aiton's calls the apricot "a native of Armenia, or, as some say, of Japan" — and modern botany has settled it on neither: domestication is traced to China and Central Asia, with the Linnaean name Prunus armeniaca preserving an old error about where Europeans first met the fruit. The industry has also moved. Aiton's boasted in 1910 that California's interior valleys held 3,000,000 trees; the Santa Clara Valley orchards that supplied much of that crop were built over from the 1950s onward and became Silicon Valley, while Turkey — especially the Malatya region — now grows more apricots, and far more dried ones, than any other country. Aiton's remedy for the curculio, jarring the tree so the beetles fall on canvas to be burned, survives only as an organic-orchard technique; commercial growers rely on timed sprays and monitoring.
Written for this edition, 2026.