66 FOREIGN PLANTS, HOW INTRODUCED. 
from Smyrna by the poet Pope, and planted by him in an English 
garden; Drouyn de l’Huys, in a discourse delivered before the 
French Société d’Acclimatation, in 1860, claims for Rabelais 
the introduction of the melon, the artichoke and the Alexandria 
pink into France; and the Portuguese declare that the progeni- 
tor of all the European and American oranges was an Oriental 
tree transplanted to Lisbon, and still living in the last genera- 
tion.* The present favorite flowers of the parterres of Europe 
have been imported from America, Japan and other remote 
Oriental countries, within a century and a half, and, in fine, 
there are few vegetables of any agricultural importance, few 
ornamental trees or decorative plants, which are not now 
common to the three civilized continents. 
The statistics of vegetable emigration exhibit numerical 
results quite surprising to those not familiar with the subject. 
The lonely island of St. Helena is described as producing, at 
the time of its discovery in the year 1501, about sixty vegetable 
species, including some three or four known to grow elsewhere 
also.| At the present time its flora numbers seven hundred and 
* The name portogallo, so generally applied to the orange in Italy, seems to 
favor this claim. The orange, however, was known in Europe before the dis- 
covery of the Cape of Good Hope, and, therefore, before the establishment of 
direct relations between Portugal and the HEast.—See AMARI, Storia det 
Musulmani in Sicilia, vol. ti., p. 445, 
The date-palms of eastern and southern Spain were certainly introduced by 
the Moors. Leo von Rozmital, who visited Barcelona in 1476, says that the 
date-tree grew in great abundance in the environs of that city and ripened its 
fruit well. It is now scarcely cultivated further north than Valencia. It is 
singular that Ritter in his very full monograph on the palm does not mention 
those of Spain. 
On the introduction of conifere into England see an interesting article in the 
Edinburgh Review of October, 1864. 
MiLuer, Das Buch der Pflanzenwelt, p. 86, asserts that in 1802 the ancestor 
of all the mulberries in France, planted in 1500, was still standing in a garden 
in the village of Allan-Montélimart. 
+ It may be considered very highly probable, if not certain, that the undis- 
criminating herbalists of the sixteenth century must have overlooked many 
plants native to this island. An English botanist, in an hour’s visit to Aden, 
discovered several species of plants on rocks always reported, even by scien- 
