PLANTS CULTIVATED FOR THEIR FRUITS. 185 



Arabs. It was they who introduced it into Spain, and 

 most likely also into the east of Africa. The Portuguese 

 found it on that coast when they doubled the Cape in 

 1498.1 There is no ground for supposing that either the 

 bitter or the sweet orange existed in Africa before the 

 Middle Ages, for the myth of the garden of Hesperides 

 may refer to any species of the order Aurantiacece, and 

 its site is altogether arbitrary, since the imagination of 

 the ancients was wonderfully fertile. 



The early Anglo-Indian botanists, such as Roxburgh, 

 Royle, Griffith, Wight, had not come across the bitter 

 orange wild; but there is every probability that the 

 eastern region of India was its original country. Wallich 

 mentions Silhet,^ but without asserting that the species 

 was wild in this locality. Later, Sir Joseph Hooker^ 

 saw the bitter orange certainly wild in several districts 

 to the south of the Himalayas, from Garwal and Sikkim 

 as far as Khasia. The fruit was spherical or slightly 

 flattened, two inches in diameter, bright in colour, and 

 uneatable, of mawkish and bitter taste (" if I remember 

 right," says the author). Citrus fusca, Loureiro,* similar, 

 he says, to pi. 23 of Rumphius, and wild in Cochin-China 

 and China, may very likely be the bitter orange whose 

 area extends to the east. 



Sweet Orange — Italian, Arancio dolce ; German, 

 Apfelsine. Citrus Aiirantium sinense, Gallesio. 



Ro^de 1 says that sweet oranges grow wild at Silhet 

 and in the Nilgherry Hills, but his assertion is not 

 accompanied with sufficient detail to give it importance. 

 According to the same author, Turner's expedition 

 gathered " delicious " wild oranges at Buxedwar, a 

 locality to the north-east of Rung-poor, in the province 

 of Bengal. On the other hand, Brandis and Sir Joseph 

 Hooker do not mention the sweet oranoje as wild in 



^ Gallesio, p. 240. Goeze, Beitrag zur Kenntniss der Ch-angengeivdchse, 

 1874, p. 13, quotes early Portuguese travellers on this head. 



2 Wallich, Catalogue, No. 6384. 



3 Hooker, Fl. of Brit, hid., i. p. 515. 

 * Loureiro, Fl. Cochin., p. 571. 



^ Royle, lUustr. of Himal., p. 129. He quotes Turner, Journey to 

 Thibet, pp. 20, 887. 



