i88 3 J 
Florida . 
72 5 
lingers on the skirts of the everglades. The Seminole knows 
nothing of the shell-heaps which abound on the banks of 
rivers and shores of the sea. They are memorials of an 
older race. In the oldest shell-mounds no pottery is found. 
Only a few implements have been discovered, and these 
were wrought of shell and bone. Bones of animals killed 
for food are rare. The people who made these mounds had 
not learned the arts of agriculture. They lived almost ex- 
clusively on mollusks and fishes. Florida sustained her 
primitive man on an exquisite climate and the product of 
her waters. 
Ponce de Leon and his men brought with them oranges 
from Seville. The seed dropped on the Spanish camps 
found a better climate than they had left. Orange groves 
sprang up in the footprints of the Spaniard. In the absence 
of cultivation the trees lapsed. Perhaps no neglected fruit 
reverts to a state of nature more rapidly than the orange. 
Now and then it lapses into a primitive state. The orange 
is a berry with a leathery rind. Farthest from the berry is 
the achene. This is a small, dry, indehiscent fruit ; its 
typical form may be seen in the buttercup, which, in structure 
and colour, is a primitive flower. Now the orange is occa- 
sionally found to lapse toward this early, apocarpous condi- 
tion ; the segments partially separate, and a leathery rind 
encloses each segment. 
The Spaniards made but little out of Florida. The 
English, who followed, made no more. They ceded the 
peninsula back to Spain, and in 1820 Spain ceded it to the 
United States. We fought the Seminoles, cultivated a little 
cotton and cane, and raised cattle of little worth on worth- 
less grass. In our civil war attention was directed to the 
orange. In antebellum times, only here and there, a man 
more enterprising than ’his neighbour had cultivated this 
fruit. The only variety known was the Florida seedling. 
It is a choice orange, but it is only the old Seville modified 
by climate and culture. 
The State is gaining rapidly in population and wealth. 
Orange growing has become a great industry. The promised 
gains have lured Swedes in colonies, and English and French 
and Germans in individuals. 
These words may fall under eyes bent on Florida, and to 
be helpful we must be specific : — 
First. — Only a small portion of Florida is fit for the growth 
of oranges. Choose the richest soil you can find, and be 
sure it has a clay sub-soil. You will find no rich soil in the 
State, unless it be under water. 
