184 ORIGIN OF CULTIVATED PLANTS. 



with India and Ceylon, Gallesio supposed that these 

 trees were not cultivated in their time in the west of 

 India. He had studied from this point of view, ancient 

 travellers and geographers, snch as Diodorus Siculus, 

 Nearchus, Ai^ianus, and he finds no mention of the orange 

 in them. However, there was a Sanskrit name for the 

 orange — nagarunga, nagrunga} It is from this that the 

 word orange came, for the Hindus turned it into namn- 

 gee (pron. naroudji), according to Royle, nerunga accord- 

 ing to Piddington ; the Arabs into narunj, according to 

 Gallesio, the Italians into naranzi, arangi, and in the 

 mediaeval Latin it was aranciwm, arangium, afterwards 

 aurantium} But did the Sanskrit name apply to the 

 bitter or to the sweet orange ? The philologist Adolphe 

 Pictet formerly gave me some curious information on 

 this head. He had sought in Sanskrit works the de- 

 scriptive names given to the orange or to the tree, and 

 had found seventeen, which all allude to the colour, the 

 odour, its acid nature (danta catha, harmful to the 

 teeth), the place of growth, etc., never to a sweet or 

 agreeable taste. This multitude of names similar to 

 epithets show that the fruit had long been known, but 

 that its taste was very different to that of the sweet 

 orange. Besides, the Ai*abs, who carried the orange tree 

 with them towards the West, were first acquainted with 

 the bitter orange, and gave it the name narunj^ and 

 their physicians from the tenth century prescribed the 

 bitter juice of this fruit.'* The exhaustive researches of 

 Gallesio show that after the fall of the Empire the species 

 advanced from the coast of the Persian Gulf, and by the 

 end of the ninth century had reached Arabia, through 

 Oman, Bassora, Irak, and Syria, according to the Arabian 

 author Massoudi. The Crusaders saw the bitter orange 

 tree in Palestine. It was cultivated in Sicily from the 

 year 1002, probably a result of the incursions of the 



» Roxburgh, Fl. tndica, edit. 1832, vol. ii. p. 392 ; Piddington, Index. 



2 GaUesio, p. 122. 



■ In the modem languages of India the Sanskrit name has been 

 applied to the sweet orange, so says Brandis, by one of thoae transposi- 

 tions which are so common in popular language. 



• Gallesio, pp. 122, 247, 248. 



