174 Fruits and Fruit- Trees. 



Bergamot. The tree is perhaps usually somewhat smaller. 

 The grand feature is the fruit, which is large, dark in 

 colour, and rugged, the rind very thick, aromatic, and 

 extremely bitter. The pulp, also, has bitterness super- 

 added to the acidity. Whether or not justly considered 

 to be the best representative of the primitive orange, it is 

 certain that the western world became acquainted with it 

 very much earlier than the era of the Sweet. That the 

 ancient Greeks and Romans had no knowledge of the 

 orange, in any of its varieties, is hardly necessary to say. 

 Alexander himself does not seem to have penetrated so 

 far into India as to have met with it, or it may not then 

 have been carried into the portions of territory watered 

 by the Indus, no reference to it being made by Alex- 

 ander's historian, Nearchus. The first conveyance of it 

 towards Europe stands to the credit of the Arabs, who, 

 towards the close of the ninth century, striving on the 

 one hand to diffuse their religious faith, and with the 

 other to promote the useful arts, carried it back with 

 them into their own country, thence into Palestine, north- 

 eastern Africa, Morocco, and Spain. Those mighty 

 caliphs who from- the heart of southern Asia extended 

 their conquests to the foot of the Pyrenees, leaving traces 

 everywhere, as the Romans did, of their power and 

 knowledge, made, during their occupation of old Granada, 

 great plantations of the tree, especially around the famous 

 city of Seville, where relics of these plantations survive 

 to the present day, and from which place the fruit has 

 its duplicate name of Seville orange. The Crusaders 



