64 
INTRODUCTION OF NEW PLANTS. 
vonic, and, it has been said, in Hungarian sepulchres, is hardly 
sufficient evidence to convict those races of complicity in this 
grave offence against the temperance and the refinement of 
modern society. 
Modes of Introduction of Foreign Plants. 
Besides the vegetables I have mentioned, we know that 
many plants of smaller economical value have been the sub¬ 
jects of international exchange in very recent times. Bus- 
bequius, Austrian ambassador at Constantinople about the 
middle of the sixteenth century—whose letters contain one of 
the best accounts of Turkish life which have appeared down 
to the present day—brought home from the Ottoman capital 
the lilac and the tulip. The Belgian Clusius about the same 
time introduced from the East the horse chestnut, which has 
since wandered to America. The weeping willows of Europe 
and the United States are said to have sprung from a slip 
received from Smyrna by the poet Pope, and planted by him 
in an English garden; and the Portuguese declare that the 
progenitor of all the European and American oranges was an 
Oriental tree transplanted to Lisbon, and still living in the last 
generation.* The present favorite flowers of the parterres of 
* The name portogallo , so generally applied to the orange in Italy, 
seems to favor this claim. The orange, however, was known in Europe 
before the discovery of the Cape of Good Hope, and, therefore, before the 
establishment of direct relations between Portugal and the East. 
A correspondent of the Athenaeum, in describing the newly excavated 
villa, which has been named Livia’s Villa, near the Porta del Popolo at 
Pome, states that: “ The walls of one of the rooms are, singularly enough, 
decorated with landscape paintings, a grove of palm and orange trees, with 
fruits and birds on the branches—the colors all as fresh and lively as if 
painted yesterday.” The writer remarks on the character of this decora¬ 
tion as something very unusual in Eoman architecture ; and if the trees in 
question are really orange, and not lemon trees, this circumstance may 
throw some doubt on the antiquity of the painting. If, on the other hand, 
it proves really ancient, it shows that the orange was known to the Roman 
painters, if not gardeners. The landscape may perhaps represent oriental, 
