CHAPTER XL 

 THE CITRONS. 



The culture of few fruits antedates that of the citron. 

 Of all the citrus fruits it was the only one known to class- 

 ical writers. In Media and Persia and later in Palestine, 

 it was cultivated at a very early date and in these countries 

 the Greeks and Komans probably first met with it. The 

 Greek writer, Theophrastus, shortly after the time of 

 Alexander the Great, gave a minute and unmistakable 

 description of the citron tree, or, as it was then called, 

 the Median or Persian apple. Virgil was one of the first 

 Roman writers to mention it and used the same name as 

 Theophrastus. By Pliny's time, the fruit had been suf- 

 ficiently long in cultivation to receive a number of names, 

 and he is the first to make use of the name Citrus, the 

 botanical name afterwards adopted by Linnaeus for all the 

 related fruits as well as the citron. It appears, however, 

 that the fruit was known by the Romans and imported into 

 Rome long before it was cultivated there. But when its 

 culture was finally established in Greece, Italy and the 

 adjacent islands in the Mediterranean, it became one of 

 the important fruits in those regions into which it was 

 introduced and there it is grown to this day. 



When it was first introduced into America is merely 

 a matter of conjecture. But it must have been brought 

 to the West Indies and to South America (Brazil) shortly 

 after the discovery of the continent. The early Spanish 

 writers on the history of the New World bear testimony 

 to this fact. 



But the citron did not receive the attention bestowed 

 upon the orange. This may be attributed to the fact that 



