ECONOMIC PLANTS WORTHY OF INTRODUCTION. 



25 



fruit often has to be carried for days on the backs of donkeys or 

 camels before it reaches its nomadic consumers or the people of far- 

 distant villages. Our varieties are therefore rather distinguished for 

 size, richness in sugar (habitually more than 18° Be.), and good 

 shipping qualities than for fineness of flavor. The grapes not eaten 

 fresh are made into raisins, and the vicinity of Hebron, near Jeru- 

 salem, and more particularly of Es-Salt, in the Trans-Jordan, arc the 

 great centers of raisin production, producing about a hundred thou- 

 sand dollars' worth every year. 

 These places are at an altitude 

 of more than 2,500 feet, and the 

 grapes are grown on calcareous 

 hillsides of Cenomanian and 

 Senonian formation. 



A study of the vineyards of 

 Palestine would no doubt reveal 

 many varieties that would be 

 valuable to the United States. 

 Mr. George C. Husmann, Pomol- 

 ogist in Charge of Viticultural 

 Investigations, Bureau of Plant 

 Industry, says that among the 

 hundreds of table varieties with 

 which he has been experiment- 

 ing for years he considers the 

 Palestinian " Dattier de Beirut " 

 the best white grape and the 

 " Purple Damascus " one of the 

 best black varieties. And yet 

 neither of these is among our 

 finest Palestine sorts. 



JAFFA ORANGES. 



All of the crops mentioned Fig. 8.— Seedling orange trees at Iledera, 



have been cultivated for cen- ■™'" with a view to °"g inatin s new 



varieties. 



turies in the Orient, but oranges 



were introduced there at a relatively recent date. (See fig. 8.) 

 Hasselquist, a pupil of Linnaeus, who was the first naturalist to 

 study Palestine, in the middle of the eighteenth century, speaks 

 of the beautiful gardens of figs and pomegranates at Jaffa, but has 

 not a word to say about oranges. This silence is significant. But 

 at the time of Napoleon's Egyptian campaign, at the close of the 

 eighteenth century, the orange was mentioned among the fruit trees. 

 Chateaubriand, who traveled in the beginning of the nineteenth 

 century, also speaks of this fruit. Lamartine, visiting Palestine in 



180 



