168 OUR COMMON FRUITS. 



Romans to a kind of gourd, still called by the French 

 Citrouille, and the words citrinus and citrina, as epithets, 

 were used for many fruits after they had been adopted to 

 express the pale yellow tint proper to the Citron, a fruit 

 known in classic days, having been introduced into Italy 

 10 centuries before the orange, to which it bears a cer- 

 tain family resemblance. Aurantium seems to be formed 

 from aureum, alluding to the golden colour of the fruit ; 

 Malum aureum was looked on as a synonym of the Malum 

 Hesperidum of the ancients ; and the transition from 

 aurantium to orange appears plausible enough.* It is 

 rather fallacious, however, to seek in classic language the 

 derivation of the names of objects unknown to those who 

 spoke it. We should rather seek light in the East, and 

 there we find that lemon and orange-trees are known in 

 India by the names of Lemoen and Naregan, while Hin- 

 dostanee dictionaries give the word narendj, as still being 

 the Hindoo name for our golden-robed friends. Prom 

 narendj, then, must have come the Latin airangi, after- 

 wards modified into Aurantium, whence the English and 

 French derived their Orange, the Spaniards their Naranxa, 

 and the Italians their Naranzo. The latter people, how- 

 ever, adopt the word Agrumi as the family name for plants 

 of this kind a well chosen title, as it is derived from 

 agro, acid acidity being the dominant characteristic of 

 every species of Citrus ; and Galessio, after imperatively 

 rejecting the term of Hesperidce, as founded on fable, and 

 objecting to Citrus as properly the name of a species, 

 and therefore insufficient to express the genus which com- 

 prises both that and others as well, expresses his opinion 

 that it would be advantageous were this word agrumi or 

 agrumes (with its derivative agronome, denoting the culti- 

 vator of the plants) adopted into every language. From the 

 French, unless we could invent a better name, we certainly 

 might not do ill to borrow the term Bigarade by which they 



* The district in Prance which gave its name to the Netherlandish dynasty 

 was known to the Romans under the name of Aransio, afterwards changed to 

 Orange; but why it received the former name, or how this came to be altered 

 in the same way as was the name of the fruit, the writer, after much research, 

 has been unable to ascertain. 



