REMARKABLE ORANGE-TREES. 145 



producing racemes of capsules about the size of a cherry, 

 each of which is covered with a quantity of red powder. 

 This powder is carefully brushed off the ripe capsules, and 

 constitutes a considerable branch of commerce from those 

 parts of the Circars, being purchased by the merchants 

 trading to Hydrabad and other interior parts of the peninsula. 

 It is said to die silk of a very beautiful, bright, and durable 

 orange or flame colour. The botanical reader will be aware 

 that the genus Rotthra of Roxburgh is not the Roltlcra of 

 Vahl. The former is supposed by some botanists not to be 

 distinct from Trewia of Linnasus. 



CEDRELE.E. 



Swietenia fehrifuga and cMoroiylon furnish excellent 

 timber. The former is the redwood-tree of Coromandel, a 

 very large tree with a lofty, thick, and straight trunk. The 

 wood is of a dull-red colour, remarkably hard and heavy, 

 and used by the natives as the most durable kind they know 

 for all the wood-work in their temples. S. chloroxylon is a 

 native of the mountainous parts of the Circars, and is report- 

 ed by Roxburgh to be of a deep-yellov? colour, exceedingly 

 close-grained, heavy, and durable, and to come nearer to 

 boxwood than any other wood he had met with. 



AUEANTIACE^. 



The orange tribe, so peculiarly Indian, is now, in regard 

 to the orange, the lemon, the lime, and the shaddock, dis- 

 persed over the rest of the tropics ; and although these plants 

 are the most interesting ones that belong to the family, they 

 are too familiar to our readers to require that we should 

 devote to them any portion of this limited article. We 

 shall therefore, after saying a very few words respecting the 

 orange-tree, proceed to notice two or three less-known 

 plants. We can ferm no idea of the size and luxuriance 

 which the orange-tree is capable of attaining by the speci- 

 mens cultivated with so much attention in this northern 

 climate. It is said that in Spain there are old orange-trees 

 forming large timber. " In the convent of St. Sabina at 

 Rome there is an orange-tree thirty-one feet high, which is 

 said to be six hundred years old ; and at Nice, in 1789, there 

 ■was a tree which generally bore five or six thousand oranges, 

 which was more than fifty feet high, with a trunk that re- 



VoL. III,-=N 



