CHAPTER III. 



BOTANY OF CITRUS FRUITS. 



No more difficult problem confronts the systematic 

 pomologist than the classification of our citrus fruits. 

 This difficulty lies, not alone in the peculiarities of the 

 plants themselves, and they are surely perplexing enough, 

 but it has been greatly' increased by the innumerable 

 attempts which have been made since the days of Ferrari, 

 and before, to group the various species and varieties 

 of citrus in some sort of orderly arrangement. In truth 

 it may be said that many of these attempts, instead of 

 elucidating the problems connected with the subject, have 

 simply made, or tended to make, them more complicated. 



At the bottom of the whole trouble appears to lie the 

 disposition, on the part of many writers on citrus subjects, 

 to take the plants not as they find them growing at the 

 present day, but as they imagine or suppose they must 

 have been several hundreds or thousands of years ago. 



No one acquainted with these fruits doubts for a 

 moment but that in ages gone by, or perhaps even in more 

 recent years, though not within historical times, two or 

 more of our present distinct forms were represented by 

 a single one. But what advantage is there, for instance, 

 in throwing the sour orange, sweet orange, pomelo, kum- 

 quat and a few other distinctly different trees into one 

 conglomerate species, stretching an imaginative descrip- 

 tion over the whole bunch and then placing each of the 

 afore-mentioned plants under this species as sub-species 

 and varieties, as was done by Dr. A. Engler, in Engler 



