XVII 
THE ORIGIN OF SEEDLESS ORANGES 
I SN’T IT ODD that once in a while there appears on a 
tree a branch that yields a fruit which is quite differ¬ 
ent from that on the other branches! 
This has recently been happening in certain orange 
groves of California. It was found that here and there in 
an orchard a branch would appear with a rough-skinned, 
dwarfish, worthless fruit on it. Even whole trees were 
found that bore nothing but this useless fruit. 
The orchardmen owning these groves realized that they 
had let the stock of their trees run down or had been care¬ 
less in selecting the stock. These inferior trees had to be 
replaced. 
The orange-growers of California have, however, real¬ 
ized huge profits in the past from this tendency on the 
part of single branches to produce fruit that is different 
from that of the parent tree. In the present case the fruit 
is inferior, but there is a historical case of one of these 
offshoot fruits that was so far superior to the parent tree 
that it has become the most famous variety of fruit in all 
the world. 
The navel orange came about in just this way. It 
originated with a single branch of a single tree in Bahia, 
Brazil, away back in 1820. There was growing in that 
town an orange tree of a Portuguese stock that was fairly 
good. On one branch of it the fruit was peculiar and at¬ 
tracted attention. Its most distinguishing peculiarity 
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