GALLESKVS TREATISE ON THE CITRUS FAMILY. 



A JIT. 11. Investigation concerning Lcnwn ami ' 



Oranye Trees i nl. no trii to the Ancients Im- \ 



l'<>i>e>'ly confounded tcitli the Apple, of Hespcri- 



d<>* Accliiittitcd rci-cnthj lit .\j'ri<-<t Opiniom 



concernin</ tlt< ir Ori</in. 



When the lemon ami orange trees were 

 ; brought into Europe, the citron had been natu- 

 ral i/ed several centuries, but as this event oc- 

 \ curred in times of ignorance and barbarism, it 

 has remained buried in the shade which covers 

 ' the history of that period. 



When the study of science and of literature 

 began to revive and to diffuse light in Europe, 

 these two species of plants were no longer new ; 

 they had become so multiplied that no traces of 

 (their transmigration remained. Because of this, 

 niost writers have confounded their history with 

 that of the citron, and have thought thai, they, 

 like the citron, had been known in Italy since 

 the first centuries of the Roman empire. 



The fable of the Hesperides has helped to 

 confirm this error. The. golden color of the or- 

 ange, and even its name, have aided this confu- 

 sion of the fruits in the mind, which was also 

 very congenial to the taste for the marvellous 

 reigning at that period. Thus has this fruit been 

 accepted by all the world as the golden apple of 

 the daughter of Atlas. 



In vain have linguists said that the GreeK 

 word translated apple could as well be rendered 

 flock, and that the fable refers to the sheep with 

 golden fleece carried off by Hercules. In vain 

 has it also been said that the golden apples of 

 the poets might be coins, which, by their color, 

 assisted this allegory ; the most celebrated crit- 

 ics have persisted in believing them to be or- 

 anges. 



The Hesperides were placed by some geogra- 

 phers in an African island, thought to be no 

 other than the Fortunate isles (Canaries), now 

 covered by a great quantity of oranges ; and by 

 others, upon the west coast of Africa, whose 

 warm climate is specially suited to the culture 

 of this tree ; all this gave rise to the belief that, 

 in their voyages on this coast, the Egyptians 

 and Greeks^ having found orange groves, had 

 from this invented the fable of Hercules and the 

 enchanted gardens of the Hesperides. 



It is easy to show the folly of this opinion. 

 The fable speaks of Hercules stealing golden 

 apples in this wonderful garden, yet makes no 

 mention of a tree as delicious for shade as it is 

 agreeable by the perfume of its flowers. 



Ovid said its branches and leaves were of 

 gold ; and it is easy to be convinced by the man- 

 ner in which Homer and Hesiod speak, that 

 this tree owed its existence to the imagination 

 of poets who had invented golden apples but to 

 embellish and brighten their picture by the idea 

 of the precious metal. The Hesperides, say 

 some, were upon the west coast of Africa. They 

 were, perhaps, upon the sea-coast of the Cape 

 de Verd islands, or else in the Canaries, which 

 were known to the ancients under the name of 

 Fortunate isles. Now, in these places, which 

 certainly have been visited by Anonus, and per- 

 haps by other voyagers before and since him, 

 not only is the orange not indigenous, but 

 it was not found except where it had been 

 carried by Europeans. If we examine the 

 description made by Anoous, in his Periplus, of 



the coasts he had visited, and that which Scyllias 

 wrote of the gardens of the Hesperides, we shall 

 find no mention in either of this tree, although 

 Scyllias has described exactly all that he found. 

 The Hesperides, according to Strabon, were in 

 an island of Libyiu (Georg, 3d bk., p. 84), and 

 Scyllias describes the garden (in Periplo, p. 46). 

 Is it to be presumed that these writers had seen it 

 and wen/ not impressed by the sight, as were 

 travellers who preceded them? I have noticed 

 the same silence among the first voyagers who, 

 under Prince Henry, of Portugal, discovered all 

 this const. I have attentively read the narra- 

 tions of Alvise da Caclamosto, the history of Bar- 

 ros, the voyage of Vasco de Gama, and many 

 others, and have not found a passage which could 

 refer to the orange this side the Cape of Good 

 Hope. 



Notwithstanding, these travellers have not for- 

 gotten to speak of those they saw in Ethiopia, or 

 country of Pretre Jean. They remark at Madeira 

 the tree, which they call cedre, also the lotus, al- 

 ready mentioned by Scyllias. They tell us the 

 shores of the Cape de Verd and neighboring isles 

 are pleasantly ornamented by trees always green, 

 which they do not describe, but which we know 

 were not oranges. 



I have thought for a moment that the orange 

 was originally in the Canaries, when Louis da 

 Cadamo'sto, in his voyage in Guinea, written in 

 1463, speaks in a seemingly truthful manner of 

 this tree being well known in those islands ; but 

 I have remarked that not a word is said of it in 

 the history of the discovery and conquest of the 

 Canaries, written in 1402 by M. Jean de Bethen- 

 court, in which, however, he speaks of palms 

 and other trees. Consequently, I believe that 

 from Spain and Portugal the orange passed into 

 these islands, where, in sixty years, it had cer- 

 tainly multiplied and become known. 



Leon, the African, who wrote at the end of 

 the fifteenth century the description of the inte- 

 rior of this country, even to beyond Mount At- 

 las, where now there are so many oranges 

 among the palm trees, found none, except in the 

 Kingdom of Cano (ancient Canopus, near Egypt), 

 and we know that this district must have had for 

 a long time commercial relations with the Arabs, 

 who had already introduced the orange tree into 

 Egypt and upon the coasts of the Mediterranean. 



We should, then, conclude that to the Arabs 

 Western Africa is indebted for this plant, which 

 would thrive there as well as at Madeira and the 

 Canaries, where it had been cultivated since 1463. 

 Before this era it was known only at Morocco, 

 where the Arabs had carried it, and its culture 

 extended scarcely beyond that country, which 

 had been for a long* time acquainted with Eu- 

 rope. 



If. in Homer's time, there had been oranges 

 upon this coast, they must have multiplied infi- 

 nitely, and would not have escaped the observa- 

 tion of our navigators, who would have placed 

 the fact in their narrations ; but it was reserved 

 for Europe to enrich with this tree those happy 

 climates where the ancients had placed the fort- 

 unate isles and the delightful gardens of the 

 daughters of Atlas. 



I will not pause to combat the opinion adopted 

 by some writers that the ancients knew the or- 

 ange under the generic name of citru-s, or mala 



