CULTIVATED PLANTS. 173 



mains medica or mains assyria into Italy, but without effect, as it 

 would only grow in Media and Persia. Palladius, however, in the 

 fifth century, gives many details of the modes of propagating 

 and cultivating this tree, which he says he had carried on with 

 success on his Sardinian and Neapolitan possessions. It was 

 therefore, in all probability, in the course of the third or fourth 

 centuries that the citron was introduced and established in Italy. 



The mass of evidence collected by Prof. Targioni seems to 

 show that oranges were first brought from India into Arabia in 

 the ninth century, that they were unknown in Europe, or at any 

 rate in Italy in the eleventh, but were shortly afterwards carried 

 westwards by the Moors. They were in cultivation at Seville 

 towards the end of the twelfth century, and at Palermo in the 

 thirteenth, and probably also in Italy, for it is said that St. 

 Dominic planted an orange for the convent of S. Sabina in 

 Rome, in the year 1200. In the course of the same thirteenth 

 century, the crusaders found citrons, oranges, and lemons very 

 abundant in Palestine ; and, in the following fourteenth, both 

 oranges and lemons became common in several parts of Italy. It 

 appears, however, that the original importation of lemons from 

 India into Arabia and Syria occurred about a century later than 

 that of oranges. 



The shaddock is believed to have followed a different route in 

 its migration into Europe. Most abundantly cultivated in, and 

 possibly indigenous to, the south-eastern extremity of the Asiatic 

 continent, it is said to have been carried from thence to the 

 West Indies, and from Jamaica and Barbadoes to England early 

 in the eighteenth century. It was, however, certainly previously 

 known in Italy, for it is described and figured by Ferrari, in 1646, 

 as having been sent from Genoa to the garden of Carlo Cadenas, 

 near Naples. There is no record of its first introduction -to 

 Genoa, whether from the East or the West. 



Innumerable varieties of citrons are cultivated at Florence, 

 where they have ever been great favourites as objects of curiosity 

 as much as for their flowers and fruits. Among them is a very 

 singular one called hizzarria, raised by hybridising and cross- 

 grafting, in which the same tree produces oranges, lemons, and 

 citrons, often on the same branch, and sometimes combined into 

 one fruit, a curious case analogous to that of the well-known 

 hybrid by grafting between the Cytisus laburnum and C. purpureus. 



The two last chapters of Prof. Targioni's work are devoted 

 to ornamental trees, shrubs, and herbs of exotic origin, which have, 



