Treatise and Hand-Book of Orange Culture in Florida

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1881. Excerpt: ... APPENDIX. GALLESIO ON THE ORANGE. fN his valuable and standard work on ' The Citrus Family," which I have already quoted from several times in the preceding pages, Gallesio gives the following highly interesting account of the origin of the orange and its introduction into Europe: The orange and lemon tree were unknown to the Romans; therefore they could only have been indigenous in a country where this great people had never penetrated. We all know the vast extent of this empire, yet commercial relations extend themselves always far beyond political bounds. If these trees had been cultivated in places open to the traffic of the Romans, these fruits would have become at once the delight of the tables of Rome, given up to luxury. They could not, then, have been cultivated at this period, except in the remote parts of India, beyond the Ganges. The north of Europe and of Asia, it is true, were equally unknown to the Romans, but their climates were not at all suited to these plants. The interior and west coasts of Africa, although in great part deserts, and destitute of the moisture necessary to the orange, inclosed, nevertheless, fertile districts where it might have thriven. But the state of culture of the tree at the present time in that country, and the historic facts proving to us that it was not naturalized there till long after, make us certain that it was entirely unknown there as well as in Europe. It is true, that at the time of the discovery of the Cape of Good Hope, the Portuguese found many citrons and bigarades upon the eastern coast of Africa, and in the part of Ethiopia where Romans had never penetrated; but they found these trees only in gardens, and in a state of domesticity, and we do not know but that the Arabs, who had cultivated them in ...