The original home of this and other cultivated Anonaceæ has been the subject of doubts, which make it an interesting problem. I attempted to resolve them in 1855. The opinion at which I then arrived has been confirmed by the subsequent observations of travellers, and as it is useful to show how far probabilities based upon sound methods lead to true assertions, I will transcribe what I then said,818 mentioning afterwards the more recent discoveries.

“Robert Brown proved in 1818 that all the species of the genus Anona, excepting Anona senegalensis, belong to America, and none to Asia. Aug. de Saint-Hilaire says that, according to Vellozo, A. squamosa was introduced into Brazil, that it is known there under the name of pinha, from its resemblance to a fir-cone, and of ata, evidently borrowed from the names attoa and atis, which are those of the same plant in Asia, and which belong to Eastern languages. Therefore, adds de Saint-Hilaire,819 the Portuguese transported A. squamosa from their Indian to their American possessions, etc.”

Having made in 1832 a review of the family of the Anonaceæ,820 I noticed how Mr. Brown’s botanical argument was ever growing stronger; for in spite of the considerable increase in the number of described Anonaceæ, no Anona, nor even any species of Anonaceæ with united ovaries, had been found to be a native of Asia. I admitted821 the probability that the species came from the West Indies or from the neighbouring part of the American continent; but I inadvertently attributed this opinion to Mr. Brown, who had merely indicated an American origin in general.822

Facts of different kinds have since confirmed this view.

“Anona squamosa has been found wild in Asia, apparently as a naturalized plant; in Africa, and especially in America, with all the conditions of an indigenous plant. In fact, according to Dr. Royle,823 the species has been naturalized in several parts of India; but he only saw it apparently growing wild on the side of the mountain near the fort of Adjeegurh in Bundlecund, among teak trees. When so remarkable a tree, in a country so thoroughly explored by botanists, has only been discovered in a single locality beyond the limits of cultivation, it is most probable that it is not indigenous in the country. Sir Joseph Hooker found it in the isle of St. Iago, of the Cape Verde group, forming woods on the hills which overlook the valley of St. Domingo.824 Since A. squamosa is only known as a cultivated plant on the neighbouring continent;825 as it is not even indicated in Guinea by Thonning,826 nor in Congo,827 nor in Senegambia,828 nor in Abyssinia and Egypt, which proves a recent introduction into Africa; lastly, as the Cape Verde Isles have lost a great part of their primitive forests, I believe that this is a case of naturalization from seed escaped from gardens. Authors are agreed in considering the species wild in Jamaica. Formerly the assertions of Sloane829 and Brown830 might have been disregarded, but they are confirmed by Macfadyen.831 Martius found the species wild in the virgin forests of Para.832 He even says, ‘Sylvescentem in nemoribus paraensibus inveni,’ whence it may be inferred that these trees alone formed a forest. Splitgerber833 found it in the forests of Surinam, but he says, ‘An spontanea?’ The number of localities in this part of America is significant. I need not remind my readers that no tree growing elsewhere than on the coast has been found truly indigenous at once in tropical Asia, Africa, and America.834 The result of my researches renders such a fact almost impossible, and if a tree were robust enough to extend over such an area, it would be extremely common in all tropical countries.

“Moreover, historical and philological facts tend also to confirm the theory of an American origin. The details given by Rumphius835 show that Anona squamosa was a plant newly cultivated in most of the islands of the Malay Archipelago. Forster does not mention the cultivation of any Anonacea in the small islands of the Pacific.836 Rheede837 says that A. squamosa is an exotic in Malabar, but was brought to India, first by the Chinese and the Arabs, afterwards by the Portuguese. It is certainly cultivated in China and in Cochin-China,838 and in the Philippine Isles,839 but we do not know from what epoch. It is doubtful whether the Arabs cultivate it.840 It was cultivated in India in Roxburgh’s day;841 he had not seen the wild plant, and only mentions one common name in a modern language, the Bengali ata, which is already in Rheede. Later the name gunda-gatra842 was believed to be Sanskrit, but Dr. Royle843 having consulted Wilson, the famous author of the Sanskrit dictionary, touching the antiquity of this name, he replied that it was taken from the Sabda Chanrika, a comparatively modern compilation. The names of ata, ati, are found in Rheede and Rumphius.844 This is doubtless the foundation of Saint-Hilaire’s argument; but a nearly similar name is given to Anona squamosa in Mexico. This name is ate, ahate di Panucho, found in Hernandez845 with two similar and rather poor figures which may be attributed either to A. squamosa, as Dunal846 thinks, or to A. cherimolia, according to Martius.847 Oviedo uses the name anon.848 It is very possible that the name ata was introduced into Brazil from Mexico and the neighbouring countries. It may also, I confess, have come from the Portuguese colonies in the East Indies. Martius says, however, that the species was imported from the West India Islands.849 I do not know whether he had any proof of this, or whether he speaks on the authority of Oviedo’s work, which he quotes and which I cannot consult. Oviedo’s article, translated by Marcgraf,850 describes A. squamosa without speaking of its origin.

“The sum total of the facts is altogether in favour of an American origin. The locality where the species usually appears wild is in the forests of Para. Its cultivation is ancient in America, since Oviedo is one of the first authors (1535) who has written about this country. No doubt its cultivation is of ancient date in Asia likewise, and this renders the problem curious. It is not proved, however, that it was anterior to the discovery of America, and it seems to me that a tree of which the fruit is so agreeable would have been more widely diffused in the old world if it had always existed there. Moreover, it would be difficult to explain its cultivation in America in the beginning of the sixteenth century, on the hypothesis of an origin in the old world.”

Since I wrote the above, I find the following facts published by different authors:—

1. The argument drawn from the fact that there is no Asiatic species of the genus Anona is stronger than ever. A. Asiatica, Linnæus, was based upon errors (see my note in the Géogr. Bot., p. 862). A. obtusifolia (Tussac, Fl. des Antilles, i. p. 191, pl. 28), cultivated formerly in St. Domingo as of Asiatic origin, is also perhaps founded upon a mistake. I suspect that the drawing represents the flower of one species (A. muricata) and the fruit of another (A. squamosa). No Anona has been discovered in Asia, but four or five are now known in Africa instead of only one or two,851 and a larger number than formerly in America.

2. The authors of recent Asiatic floras do not hesitate to consider the Anonæ, particularly A. squamosa, which is here and there found apparently wild, as naturalized in the neighbourhood of cultivated ground and of European settlements.852

3. In the new African floras already quoted, A. squamosa and the others of which I shall speak presently are always mentioned as cultivated species.

4. McNab, the horticulturist, found A. squamosa in the dry plains of Jamaica,853 which confirms the assertions of previous authors. Eggers says854 that the species is common in the thickets of Santa Cruz and Virgin Islands. I do not find that it has been discovered wild in Cuba.

5. On the American continent it is given as cultivated.855 However, M. André sent me a specimen from a stony district in the Magdalena valley, which appears to belong to this species and to be wild. The fruit is wanting, which renders the matter doubtful. From the note on the ticket, it is a delicious fruit like that of A. squamosa. Warming856 mentions the species as cultivated at Lagoa Santa in Brazil. It appears, therefore, to be cultivated or naturalized from cultivation in Para, Guiana, and New Granada.

In fine, it can hardly be doubted, in my opinion, that its original country is America, and in especial the West India Islands.

Sour Sop—Anona muricata, Linnæus.

This fruit-tree,857 introduced into all the colonies in tropical countries is wild in the West Indies; at least, its existence has been proved in the islands of Cuba, St. Domingo, Jamaica, and several of the smaller islands.858 It is sometimes naturalized on the continent of South America near dwellings.859 André brought specimens from the district of Cauca in New Granada, but he does not say they were wild, and I see that Triana (Prodr. Fl. Granat.) only mentions it as cultivated.

Custard Apple in the West Indies, Bullock’s Heart in the East Indies—Anona reticulata, Linnæus.

This Anona, figured in Descourtilz, Flore Médicale des Antilles, ii. pl. 82, and in the Botanical Magazine, pl. 2912, is wild in Cuba, Jamaica, St. Vincent, Guadeloupe, Santa Cruz, and Barbados,860 and also in the island of Tobago in the Bay of Panama,861 and in the province of Antioquia in New Granada.862 If it is wild in the last-named localities as well as in the West Indies, its area probably extends into several states of Central America and of New Granada.

Although the bullock’s heart is not much esteemed as a fruit, the species has been introduced into most tropical colonies. Rheede and Rumphius found it in plantations in Southern Asia. According to Welwitsch, it has naturalized itself from cultivation in Angola, in Western Africa,863 and this has also taken place in British India.864

Chirimoya—Anona Cherimolia, Lamarck.

The chirimoya is not so generally cultivated in the colonies as the preceding species, although the fruit is excellent. This is probably the reason that there is no illustration of the fruit better than that of Feuillée (Obs., iii. pl. 17), while the flower is well represented in pl. 2011 of the Botanical Magazine, under the name of A. tripetala.

In 1855, I wrote as follows, touching the origin of the species:865 “The chirimoya is mentioned by Lamarck and Dunal as growing in Peru; but Feuillée, who was the first to speak of it,866 says that it is cultivated. Macfadyen867 says it abounds in the Port Royal Mountains, Jamaica; but he adds that it came originally from Peru, and must have been introduced long ago, whence it appears that the species is cultivated in the higher plantations, rather than wild. Sloane does not mention it. Humboldt and Bonpland saw it cultivated in Venezuela and New Granada; Martius in Brazil,868 where the seeds had been introduced from Peru. The species is cultivated in the Cape Verde Islands, and on the coast of Guinea,869 but it does not appear to have been introduced into Asia. Its American origin is evident. I might even go further, and assert that it is a native of Peru, rather than of New Granada or Mexico. It will probably be found wild in one of these countries. Meyen has not brought it from Peru.”870

My doubts are now lessened, thanks to a kind communication from M. Ed. André. I may mention first, that I have seen specimens from Mexico gathered by Botteri and Bourgeau, and that authors often speak of finding the species in this region, in the West Indies, in Central America, and New Granada. It is true, they do not say that it is wild. On the contrary, they remark that it is cultivated, or that it has escaped from gardens and become naturalized.871 Grisebach asserts that it is wild from Peru to Mexico, but he gives no proof. André gathered, in a valley in the south-west of Ecuador, specimens which certainly belong to the species as far as it can be asserted without seeing the fruit. He says nothing as to its wild nature, but the care with which he points out in other cases plants cultivated or perhaps escaped from cultivation, leads me to think that he regards these specimens as wild. Claude Gay says that the species has been cultivated in Chili from time immemorial.872 However, Molina, who mentions several fruit trees in the ancient plantations of the country, does not speak of it.873

In conclusion, I consider it most probable that the species is indigenous in Ecuador, and perhaps in the neighbouring part of Peru.

Oranges and Lemons—Citrus, Linnæus.

The different varieties of citrons, lemons, oranges, shaddocks, etc., cultivated in gardens have been the subject of remarkable works by several horticulturists, among which Gallesio and Risso874 hold the first rank. The difficulty of observing and classifying so many varieties was very great. Fair results have been obtained, but it must be owned that the method was wrong from the beginning, since the plants from which the observations were taken were all cultivated, that is to say, more or less artificial, and perhaps in some cases hybrids. Botanists are now more fortunate. Thanks to the discoveries of travellers in British India, they are able to distinguish the wild and therefore the true and natural species. According to Sir Joseph Hooker,875 who was himself a collector in India, the work of Brandis876 is the best on the Citrus of this region, and he follows it in his flora. I shall do likewise in default of a monograph of the genus, remarking also that the multitude of garden varieties which have been described and figured for centuries, ought to be identified as far as possible with the wild species.877

The same species, and perhaps others also, probably grow wild in Cochin-China and in China; but this has not been proved in the country itself, nor by means of specimens examined by botanists. Perhaps the important works of Pierre, now in course of publication, will give information on this head for Cochin-China. With regard to China, I will quote the following passage from Dr. Bretschneider,878 which is interesting from the special knowledge of the writer:—“Oranges, of which there are a great variety in China, are counted by the Chinese among their wild fruits. It cannot be doubted that most of them are indigenous, and have been cultivated from very early times. The proof of this is that each species or variety bears a distinct name, besides being in most cases represented by a particular character, and is mentioned in the Shu-king, Rh-ya, and other ancient works.”

Men and birds disperse the seeds of Aurantiaceæ, whence results the extension of its area, and its naturalization in all the warm regions of the two worlds. It was observed879 in America from the first century after the conquest, and now groves of orange trees have sprung up even in the south of the United States.

Shaddock—Citrus decumana, Willdenow.

I take this species first, because its botanical character is more marked than that of the others. It is a larger tree, and this species alone has down on the young shoots and the under sides of the leaves. The fruit is spherical, or nearly spherical, larger than an orange, sometimes even as large as a man’s head. The juice is slightly acid, the rind remarkably thick. Good illustrations of the fruit may be seen in Duhamel, Traité des Arbres, edit. 2, vii. pl. 42, and in Tussac, Flore des Antilles, iii. pls. 17, 18. The number of varieties in the Malay Archipelago indicates an ancient cultivation. Its original country is not yet accurately known, because the trees which appear indigenous may be the result of naturalization, following frequent cultivation. Roxburgh says that the species was brought to Calcutta from Java,880 and Rumphius881 believed it to be a native of Southern China. Neither he nor modern botanists saw it wild in the Malay Archipelago.882 In China the species has a simple name, yu; but its written character883 appears too complicated for a truly indigenous plant. According to Loureiro, the tree is common in China and Cochin-China, but this does not imply that it is wild.884 It is in the islands to the east of the Malay Archipelago that the clearest indications of a wild existence are found. Forster885 formerly said of this species, “very common in the Friendly Isles.” Seemann886 is yet more positive about the Fiji Isles. “Extremely common,” he says, “and covering the banks of the rivers.”

It would be strange if a tree, so much cultivated in the south of Asia, should have become naturalized to such a degree in certain islands of the Pacific, while it has scarcely been seen elsewhere. It is probably indigenous to them, and may perhaps yet be discovered wild in some islands nearer to Java.

The French name, pompelmouse, is from the Dutch pompelmoes. Shaddock was the name of a captain who first introduced the species into the West Indies.887

Citron, Lemon—Citrus medica, Linnæus.

This tree, like the common orange, is glabrous in all its parts. Its fruit, longer than it is wide, is surmounted in most of its varieties by a sort of nipple. The juice is more or less acid. The young shoots and the petals are frequently tinted red. The rind of the fruit is often rough, and very thick in some subvarieties.888

Brandis and Sir Joseph Hooker distinguish four cultivated varieties:—

1. Citrus medica proper (citron in English, cedratier in French, cedro in Italian), with large, not spherical fruit, whose highly aromatic rind is covered with lumps, and of which the juice is neither abundant nor very acid. According to Brandis, it was called vijapûra in Sanskrit.

2. Citrus medica Limonum (citronnier in French, lemon in English). Fruit of average size, not spherical, and abundant acid juice.

3. Citrus medica acida (C. acida, Roxburgh). Lime in English. Small flowers, fruit small and variable in shape, juice very acid. According to Brandis, the Sanskrit name was jambira.

4. Citrus medica Limetta (C. Limetta and C. Lumia of Risso), with flowers like those of the preceding variety, but with spherical fruit and sweet, non-aromatic juice. In India it is called the sweet lime.

The botanist Wight affirms that this last variety is wild in the Nilgherry Hills. Other forms, which answer more or less exactly to the three other varieties, have been found wild by several Anglo-Indian botanists889 in the warm districts at the foot of the Himalayas, from Garwal to Sikkim, in the south-east at Chittagong and in Burmah, and in the south-west in the western Ghauts and the Satpura Mountains. From this it cannot be doubted that the species is indigenous in India, and even under different forms of prehistoric antiquity.

I doubt whether its area includes China or the Malay Archipelago. Loureiro mentions Citrus medica in Cochin-China only as a cultivated plant, and Bretschneider tells us that the lemon has Chinese names which do not exist in the ancient writings, and for which the written characters are complicated, indications of a foreign species. It may, he says, have been introduced. In Japan the species is only a cultivated one.890 Lastly, several of Rumphius’ illustrations show varieties cultivated in the Sunda Islands, but none of these are considered by the author as really wild and indigenous to the country. To indicate the locality, he sometimes used the expression “in hortis sylvestribus,” which might be translated shrubberies. Speaking of his Lemon sussu (vol. ii. pl. 25), which is a Citrus medica with ellipsoidal acid fruit, he says it has been introduced into Amboyna, but that it is commoner in Java, “usually in forests.” This may be the result of an accidental naturalization from cultivation. Miquel, in his modern flora of the Dutch Indies,891 does not hesitate to say that Citrus medica and C. Limonum are only cultivated in the archipelago.

The cultivation of more or less acid varieties spread into Western Asia at an early date, at least into Mesopotamia and Media. This can hardly be doubted, for two varieties had Sanskrit names; and, moreover, the Greeks knew the fruit through the Medes, whence the name Citrus medica. Theophrastus892 was the first to speak of it under the name of apple of Media and of Persia, in a phrase often repeated and commented on in the last two centuries.893 It evidently applies to Citrus medica; but while he explains how the seed is first sown in vases, to be afterwards transplanted, the author does not say whether this was the Greek custom, or whether he was describing the practice of the Medes. Probably the citron was not then cultivated in Greece, for the Romans did not grow it in their gardens at the beginning of the Christian era.

Dioscorides,894 born in Cilicia, and who wrote in the first century, speaks of it in almost the same terms as Theophrastus. It is supposed that the species was, after many attempts,895 cultivated in Italy in the third or fourth century. Palladius, in the fifth century, speaks of it as well established.

The ignorance of the Romans of the classic period touching foreign plants has caused them to confound, under the name of lignum citreum, the wood of Citrus, with that of Cedrus, of which fine tables were made, and which was a cedar, or a Thuya, of the totally different family of Coniferæ.

The Hebrews must have known the citron before the Romans, because of their frequent relations with Persia, Media and the adjacent countries. The custom of the modern Jews of presenting themselves at the synagogue on the day of the Feast of Tabernacles, with a citron in their hand, gave rise to the belief that the word hadar in Leviticus signified lemon or citron; but Risso has shown, by comparing the ancient texts, that it signifies a fine fruit, or the fruit of a fine tree. He even thinks that the Hebrews did not know the citron or lemon at the beginning of our era, because the Septuagint Version translates hadar by fruit of a fine tree. Nevertheless, as the Greeks had seen the citron in Media and in Persia in the time of Theophrastus, three centuries before Christ, it would be strange if the Hebrews had not become acquainted with it at the time of the Babylonish Captivity. Besides, the historian Josephus says that in his time the Jews bore Persian apples, malum persicum, at their feasts, one of the Greek names for the citron.

The varieties with very acid fruit, like Limonum and acida, did not perhaps attract attention so early as the citron, however the strongly aromatic odour mentioned by Dioscorides and Theophrastus appears to indicate them. The Arabs extended the cultivation of the lemon in Africa and Europe. According to Gallesio, they transported it, in the tenth century of our era, from the gardens of Oman into Palestine and Egypt. Jacques de Vitry, in the thirteenth century, well described the lemon which he had seen in Palestine. An author named Falcando mentions in 1260 some very acid “lumias” which were cultivated near Palermo, and Tuscany had them also towards the same period.896

Orange—Citrus Aurantium, Linnæus (excl. var. γ); Citrus Aurantium, Risso.

Oranges are distinguished from shaddocks (C. decumana) by the complete absence of down on the young shoots and leaves, by their smaller fruit, always spherical, and by a thinner rind. They differ from lemons and citrons in their pure white flowers; in the fruit, which is never elongated, and without a nipple on the summit; in the rind, smooth or nearly so, and adhering but lightly to the pulp.

Neither Risso, in his excellent monograph of Citrus, nor modern authors, as Brandis and Sir Joseph Hooker, have been able to discover any other character than the taste to distinguish the sweet orange from more or less bitter fruits. This difference appeared to me of such slight importance from the botanical point of view, when I studied the question of origin in 1855, that I was inclined, with Risso, to consider these two sorts of orange as simple varieties. Modern Anglo-Indian authors do the same. They add a third variety, which they call Bergamia, for the bergamot orange, of which the flower is smaller, and the fruit spherical or pyriform, and smaller than the common orange, aromatic and slightly acid. This last form has not been found wild, and appears to me to be rather a product of cultivation.

It is often asked whether the seeds of sweet oranges yield sweet oranges, and of bitter, bitter oranges. It matters little from the point of view of the distinction into species or varieties, for we know that both in the animal and vegetable kingdoms all characters are more or less hereditary, that certain varieties are habitually so, to such a degree that they should be called races, and that the distinction into species must consequently be founded upon other considerations, such as the absence of intermediate forms, or the failure of crossed fertilization to produce fertile hybrids. However, the question is not devoid of interest in the present case, and I must answer that experiments have given results which are at times contradictory.

Gallesio, an excellent observer, expresses himself as follows:—“I have during a long series of years sown pips of sweet oranges, taken sometimes from the natural tree, sometimes from oranges grafted on bitter orange trees or lemon trees. The result has always been trees bearing sweet fruit; and the same has been observed for more than sixty years by all the gardeners of Finale. There is no instance of a bitter orange tree from seed of sweet oranges, nor of a sweet orange tree from the seed of bitter oranges.... In 1709, the orange trees of Finale having been killed by frost, the practice of raising sweet orange trees from seed was introduced, and every one of these plants produced the sweet-juiced fruit.”897

Macfadyen,898 on the contrary, in his Flora of Jamaica, says, “It is a well-established fact, familiar to every one who has been any length of time in this island, that the seed of the sweet orange very frequently grows up into a tree bearing the bitter fruit, numerous well-attested instances of which have come to my own knowledge. I am not aware, however, that the seed of the bitter orange has ever grown up into the sweet-fruited variety.... We may therefore conclude,” the author judiciously goes on to say, “that the bitter orange was the original stock.” He asserts that in calcareous soil the sweet orange may be raised from seed, but that in other soils it produces fruits more or less sour or bitter. Duchassaing says that in Guadeloupe the seeds of sweet oranges often yield bitter fruit,899 while, according to Dr. Ernst, at Caracas they sometimes yield sour but not bitter fruit.900 Brandis relates that at Khasia, in India, as far as he can verify the fact, the extensive plantations of sweet oranges are from seed. These differences show the variable degree of heredity, and confirm the opinion that these two kinds of orange should be considered as two varieties, not two species.

I am, however, obliged to take them in succession, to explain their origin and the extent of their cultivation at different epochs.

Bitter Orange—Arancio forte in Italian, bigaradier in French, pomeranze in German. Citrus vulgaris, Risso; C. aurantium (var. bigaradia), Brandis and Hooker.

It was unknown to the Greeks and Romans, as well as the sweet orange. As they had had communication with India and Ceylon, Gallesio supposed that these trees were not cultivated in their time in the west of India. He had studied from this point of view, ancient travellers and geographers, such as Diodorus Siculus, Nearchus, Arianus, and he finds no mention of the orange in them. However, there was a Sanskrit name for the orange—nagarunga, nagrunga.901 It is from this that the word orange came, for the Hindus turned it into narungee (pron. naroudji), according to Royle, nerunga according to Piddington; the Arabs into narunj, according to Gallesio, the Italians into naranzi, arangi, and in the mediæval Latin it was arancium, arangium, afterwards aurantium.902 But did the Sanskrit name apply to the bitter or to the sweet orange? The philologist Adolphe Pictet formerly gave me some curious information on this head. He had sought in Sanskrit works the descriptive names given to the orange or to the tree, and had found seventeen, which all allude to the colour, the odour, its acid nature (danta catha, harmful to the teeth), the place of growth, etc., never to a sweet or agreeable taste. This multitude of names similar to epithets show that the fruit had long been known, but that its taste was very different to that of the sweet orange. Besides, the Arabs, who carried the orange tree with them towards the West, were first acquainted with the bitter orange, and gave it the name narunj,903 and their physicians from the tenth century prescribed the bitter juice of this fruit.904 The exhaustive researches of Gallesio show that after the fall of the Empire the species advanced from the coast of the Persian Gulf, and by the end of the ninth century had reached Arabia, through Oman, Bassora, Irak, and Syria, according to the Arabian author Massoudi. The Crusaders saw the bitter orange tree in Palestine. It was cultivated in Sicily from the year 1002, probably a result of the incursions of the Arabs. It was they who introduced it into Spain, and most likely also into the east of Africa. The Portuguese found it on that coast when they doubled the Cape in 1498.905 There is no ground for supposing that either the bitter or the sweet orange existed in Africa before the Middle Ages, for the myth of the garden of Hesperides may refer to any species of the order Aurantiaceæ, and its site is altogether arbitrary, since the imagination of the ancients was wonderfully fertile.

The early Anglo-Indian botanists, such as Roxburgh, Royle, Griffith, Wight, had not come across the bitter orange wild; but there is every probability that the eastern region of India was its original country. Wallich mentions Silhet,906 but without asserting that the species was wild in this locality. Later, Sir Joseph Hooker907 saw the bitter orange certainly wild in several districts to the south of the Himalayas, from Garwal and Sikkim as far as Khasia. The fruit was spherical or slightly flattened, two inches in diameter, bright in colour, and uneatable, of mawkish and bitter taste (“if I remember right,” says the author). Citrus fusca, Loureiro,908 similar, he says, to pl. 23 of Rumphius, and wild in Cochin-China and China, may very likely be the bitter orange whose area extends to the east.

Sweet Orange—Italian, Arancio dolce; German, Apfelsine. Citrus Aurantium sinense, Gallesio.

Royle909 says that sweet oranges grow wild at Silhet and in the Nilgherry Hills, but his assertion is not accompanied with sufficient detail to give it importance. According to the same author, Turner’s expedition gathered “delicious” wild oranges at Buxedwar, a locality to the north-east of Rungpoor, in the province of Bengal. On the other hand, Brandis and Sir Joseph Hooker do not mention the sweet orange as wild in British India; they only give it as cultivated. Kurz does not mention it in his forest flora of British Burmah. Further east, in Cochin-China, Loureiro910 describes a C. Aurantium, with bitter-sweet (acido-dulcis) pulp, which appears to be the sweet orange, and which is found both wild and cultivated in China and Cochin-China. Chinese authors consider orange trees in general as natives of their country, but precise information about each species and variety is wanting on this head.

From the collected facts, it seems that the sweet orange is a native of Southern China and of Cochin-China, with a doubtful and accidental extension of area by seed into India.

By seeking in what country it was first cultivated, and how it was propagated, some light may be thrown upon the origin, and upon the distinction between the bitter and sweet orange. So large a fruit, and one so agreeable to the palate as the sweet orange, can hardly have existed in any district, without some attempts having been made to cultivate it. It is easily raised from seed, and nearly always produces the wished-for quality. Neither can ancient travellers and historians have neglected to notice the introduction of so remarkable a fruit tree. On this historical point Gallesio’s study of ancient authors has produced extremely interesting results.

He first proves that the orange trees brought from India by the Arabs into Palestine, Egypt, the south of Europe, and the east coast of Africa, were not the sweet-fruited tree. Up to the fifteenth century, Arab books and chronicles only mention bitter, or sour oranges. However, when the Portuguese arrived in the islands of Southern Asia, they found the sweet orange, and apparently it had not previously been unknown to them. The Florentine who accompanied Vasco de Gama, and who published an account of the voyage, says, “Sonvi melarancie assai, ma tutte dolci” (there are plenty of oranges, but all sweet.) Neither this writer nor subsequent travellers expressed surprise at the pleasant taste of the fruit. Hence Gallesio infers that the Portuguese were not the first to bring the sweet orange from India, which they reached in 1498, nor from China, which they reached in 1518. Besides, a number of writers in the beginning of the sixteenth century speak of the sweet orange as a fruit already cultivated in Spain and Italy. There are several testimonies for the years 1523, and 1525. Gallesio goes no further than the idea that the sweet orange was introduced into Europe towards the beginning of the fifteenth century;911 but Targioni quotes from Valeriani a statute of Fermo, of the fourteenth century, referring to citrons, sweet oranges, etc.;912 and the information recently collected from early authors by Goeze,913 about the introduction into Spain and Portugal, agrees with this date. It therefore appears to me probable that the oranges imported later from China by the Portuguese were only of better quality than those already known in Europe, and that the common expressions, Portugal and Lisbon oranges, are due to this circumstance.

If the sweet orange had been cultivated at a very early date in India, it would have had a special name in Sanskrit; the Greeks would have known it after Alexander’s expedition, and the Hebrews would have early received it through Mesopotamia. This fruit would certainly have been valued, cultivated, and propagated in the Roman empire, in preference to the lemon, citron, and bitter orange. Its existence in India must, therefore, be less ancient.

In the Malay Archipelago the sweet orange was believed to come from China.914 It was but little diffused in the Pacific Isles at the time of Cook’s voyages.915

We come back thus by all sorts of ways to the idea that the sweet variety of the orange came from China and Cochin-China, and that it spread into India perhaps towards the beginning of the Christian era. It may have become naturalized from cultivation in many parts of India and in all tropical countries, but we have seen that the seed does not always yield trees bearing sweet fruit. This defect in heredity in certain cases is in support of the theory that the sweet orange was derived from the bitter, at some remote epoch, in China or Cochin-China, and has since been carefully propagated on account of its horticultural value.

Mandarin—Citrus nobilis, Loureiro.

This species, characterized by its smaller fruit, uneven on the surface, spherical, but flattened at the top, and of a peculiar flavour, is now prized in Europe as it has been from the earliest times in China and Cochin-China. The Chinese call it kan.916 Rumphius had seen it cultivated in all the Sunda Islands,917 and says that it was introduced thither from China, but it had not spread into India. Roxburgh and Sir Joseph Hooker do not mention it, but Clarke informs me that its culture has been greatly extended in the district of Khasia. It was new to European gardens at the beginning of the present century, when Andrews published a good illustration of it in the Botanist’s Repository (pl. 608).

According to Loureiro,918 this tree, of average size, grows in Cochin-China, and also, he adds, in China, although he had not seen it in Canton. This is not very precise information as to its wild character, but no other origin can be supposed. According to Kurz,919 the species is only cultivated in British Burmah. If this is confirmed, its area would be restricted to Cochin-China and a few provinces in China.

Mangosteen—Garcinia mangostana, Linnæus.

There is a good illustration in the Botanical Magazine, pl. 4847, of this tree, belonging to the order Guttiferæ, of which the fruit is considered one of the best in existence. It demands a very hot climate, for Roxburgh could not make it grow north of twenty-three and a half degrees of latitude in India,920 and, transported to Jamaica, it bears but poor fruit.921 It is cultivated in the Sunda Islands, in the Malay Peninsula, and in Ceylon.

The species is certainly wild in the forests of the Sunda Islands922 and of the Malay Peninsula.923 Among cultivated plants it is one of the most local, both in its origin, habitation, and in cultivation. It belongs, it is true, to one of those families in which the mean area of the species is most restricted.

Mamey, or Mammee Apple—Mammea Americana, Jacquin.

This tree, of the order Guttiferæ, requires, like the mangosteen, great heat. Although much cultivated in the West Indies and in the hottest parts of Venezuela,924 its culture has seldom been attempted, or has met with but little success, in Asia and Africa, if we are to judge by the silence of most authors.

It is certainly indigenous in the forests of most of the West Indies.925 Jacquin mentions it also for the neighbouring continent, but I do not find this confirmed by modern authors. The best illustration is that in Tussac’s Flore des Antilles, iii. pl. 7, and this author gives a number of details respecting the use of the fruit.

Ochro, or Gombo—Hibiscus esculentus, Linnæus.

The young fruits of this annual, of the order of Malvaceæ, form one of the most delicate of tropical vegetables. Tussac’s Flore des Antilles contains a fine plate of the species, and gives all the details a gourmet could desire on the manner of preparing the caloulou, so much esteemed by the creoles of the French colonies.

When I formerly926 tried to discover whence this plant, cultivated in the old and new worlds, came originally, the absence of a Sanskrit name, and the fact that the first writers on the Indian flora had not seen it wild, led me to put aside the hypothesis of an Asiatic origin. However, as the modern flora of British India927 mentions it as “probably of native origin,” I was constrained to make further researches.

Although Southern Asia has been thoroughly explored during the last thirty years, no locality is mentioned where the Gombo is wild or half wild. There is no indication, even, of an ancient cultivation in Asia. The doubt, therefore, lies between Africa and America. The plant has been seen wild in the West Indies by a good observer,928 but I can discover no similar assertion on the part of any other botanist, either with respect to the islands or to the American continent. The earliest writer on Jamaica, Sloane, had only seen the species in a state of cultivation. Marcgraf929 had observed it in Brazilian plantations, and as he mentions a name from the Congo and Angola country, quillobo, which the Portuguese corrupted into quingombo, the African origin is hereby indicated.

Schweinfurth and Ascherson930 saw the plant wild in the Nile Valley in Nubia, Kordofan, Senaar, Abyssinia, and in the Baar-el-Abiad, where, indeed, it is cultivated. Other travellers are mentioned as having gathered specimens in Africa, but it is not specified whether these plants were cultivated or wild at a distance from habitations. We should still be in doubt if Flückiger and Hanbury931 had not made a bibliographical discovery which settles the question. The Arabs call the fruit bamyah, or bâmiat, and Abul-Abas-Elnabati, who visited Egypt long before the discovery of America, in 1216, has distinctly described the gombo then cultivated by the Egyptians.

In spite of its undoubtedly African origin, it does not appear that the species was cultivated in Lower Egypt before the Arab rule. No proof has been found in ancient monuments, although Rosellini thought he recognized the plant in a drawing, which differs widely from it according to Unger.932 The existence of one name in modern Indian languages, according to Piddington, confirms the idea of its propagation towards the East after the beginning of the Christian era.

Vine—Vitis vinifera, Linnæus.

The vine grows wild in the temperate regions of Western Asia, Southern Europe, Algeria, and Marocco.933 It is especially in the Pontus, in Armenia, to the south of the Caucasus and of the Caspian Sea, that it grows with the luxuriant wildness of a tropical creeper, clinging to tall trees and producing abundant fruit without pruning or cultivation. Its vigorous growth is mentioned in ancient Bactriana, Cabul, Kashmir, and even in Badakkhan to the north of the Hindu Koosh.934 Of course, it is a question whether the plants found there, as elsewhere, are not sprung from seeds carried from vineyards by birds. I notice, however, that the most trustworthy botanists, those who have most thoroughly explored the Transcaucasian provinces of Russia, do not hesitate to say that the plant is wild and indigenous in this region. It is as we advance towards India and Arabia, Europe and the north of Africa, that we frequently find in floras the expression that the vine is “subspontaneous,” perhaps wild, or become wild (verwildert is the expressive German term).

The dissemination by birds must have begun very early, as soon as the fruit existed, before cultivation, before the migration of the most ancient Asiatic peoples, perhaps before the existence of man in Europe or even in Asia. Nevertheless, the frequency of cultivation, and the multitude of forms of the cultivated grape, may have extended naturalization and introduced among wild vines varieties which originated in cultivation. In fact, natural agents, such as birds, winds, and currents, have always widened the area of species, independently of man, as far as the limits imposed in each age by geographical and physical conditions, together with the hostile action of other plants and animals, allow. An absolutely primitive habitation is more or less mythical, but habitations successively extended or restricted are in accordance with the nature of things. They constitute areas more or less ancient and real, provided that the species has maintained itself wild without the constant addition of fresh seed.

Concerning the vine, we have proofs of its great antiquity in Europe as in Asia. Seeds of the grape have been found in the lake-dwellings of Castione, near Parma, which date from the age of bronze,935 in a prehistoric settlement of Lake Varese,936 and in the lake-dwellings of Wangen, Switzerland, but in the latter instance at an uncertain depth.937 And, what is more, vine-leaves have been found in the tufa round Montpellier, where they were probably deposited before the historical epoch, and in the tufa of Meyrargue in Provence, which is certainly prehistoric,938 though later than the tertiary epoch of geologists.939

A Russian botanist, Kolenati,940 has made some very interesting observations on the different varieties of the vine, both wild and cultivated, in the country which may be called the central, and perhaps the most ancient home of the species, the south of the Caucasus. I consider his opinion the more important that the author has based his classification of varieties with reference to the downy character and veining of the leaves, points absolutely indifferent to cultivators, and which consequently must far better represent the natural conditions of the plant. He says that the wild vines, of which he had seen an immense quantity between the Black and Caspian Seas, may be grouped into two subspecies which he describes, and declares are recognizable at a distance, and which are the point of departure of cultivated vines, at least in Armenia and the neighbourhood. He recognized them near Mount Ararat, at an altitude where the vine is not cultivated, where, indeed, it could not be cultivated. Other characters—for instance, the shape and colour of the grapes—vary in each of the subspecies. We cannot enter here into the purely botanical details of Kolenati’s paper, any more than into those of Regel’s more recent work on the genus Vitis;941 but it is well to note that a species cultivated from a very remote epoch, and which has perhaps two thousand described varieties, presents in the district where it is most ancient, and probably presented before all cultivation, at least two principal forms, with others of minor importance. If the wild vines of Persia and Kashmir, of Lebanon and Greece, were observed with the same care, perhaps other sub-species of prehistoric antiquity might be found. The idea of collecting the juice of the grape and of allowing it to ferment may have occurred to different peoples, principally in Western Asia, where the vine abounds and thrives. Adolphe Pictet,942 who has, in common with numerous authors, but in a more scientific manner, considered the historical, philological, and even mythological questions relating to the vine among ancient peoples, admits that both Semitic and Aryan nations knew the use of wine, so that they may have introduced it into all the countries into which they migrated, into India and Egypt and Europe. This they were the better able to do, since they found the vine wild in several of these regions.

The records of the cultivation of the grape and of the making of wine in Egypt go back five or six thousand years.943 In the West the propagation of its culture by the Phœnicians, Greeks, and Romans is pretty well known, but to the east of Asia it took place at a late period. The Chinese who now cultivate the vine in their northern provinces did not possess it earlier than the year 122 B.C.944

It is known that several wild vines exist in the north of China, but I cannot agree with M. Regel in considering Vitis Amurensis, Ruprecht, the one most analogous to our vine, as identical in species. The seeds drawn in the Gartenflora, 1861, pl. 33, differ too widely. If the fruit of these vines of Eastern Asia had any value, the Chinese would certainly have turned them to account.

Common Jujube—Zizyphus vulgaris, Lamarck.

According to Pliny,945 the jujube tree was brought from Syria to Rome by the consul Sextus Papinius, towards the end of the reign of Augustus. Botanists, however, have observed that the species is common in rocky places in Italy,946 and that, moreover, it has not yet been found wild in Syria, although it is cultivated there, as in the whole region extending from the Mediterranean to China and Japan.947

The result of the search for the origin of the jujube tree as a wild plant bears out Pliny’s assertion, in spite of the objections I have just mentioned. According to plant collectors and authors of floras, the species appears to be more wild and more anciently cultivated in the east than in the west of its present wide area. Thus, in the north of China, de Bunge says it is “very common and very troublesome (on account of its thorns) in mountainous places.” He had seen the thornless variety in gardens. Bretschneider948 mentions the jujube as one of the fruits most prized by the Chinese, who give it the simple name tsao. He also mentions the two varieties, with and without thorns, the former wild.949 The species does not grow in the south of China and in India proper, because of the heat and moisture of the climate. It is found again wild in the Punjab, in Persia, and Armenia.

Brandis950 gives seven different names for the jujube tree (or for its varieties) in modern Indian languages, but no Sanskrit name is known. The species was therefore probably introduced into India from China, at no very distant epoch, and it must have escaped from cultivation and have become wild in the dry provinces of the west. The Persian name is anob, the Arabic unab. No Hebrew name is known, a further sign that the species is not very ancient in the west of Asia,

The ancient Greeks do not mention the common jujube, but only another species, Zizyphus lotus. At least, such is the opinion of the critic and modern botanist, Lenz.951 It must be confessed that the modern Greek name pritzuphuia has no connection with the names formerly attributed in Theophrastus and Dioscorides to some Zizyphus, but is allied to the Latin name zizyphus (fruit zizyphum) of Pliny, which does not occur in earlier authors, and seems to be rather of an Oriental than of a Latin character. Heldreich952 does not admit that the jujube tree is wild in Greece, and others say “naturalized, half-wild,” which confirms the hypothesis of a recent introduction. The same arguments apply to Italy. The species may have become naturalized there after the introduction into gardens mentioned by Pliny.

In Algeria the jujube is only cultivated or half-wild.953 So also in Spain. It is not mentioned in Marocco, nor in the Canary Isles, which argues no very ancient existence in the Mediterranean basin.

It appears to me probable, therefore, that the species is a native of the north of China; that it was introduced and became naturalized in the west of Asia after the epoch of the Sanskrit language, perhaps two thousand five hundred or three thousand years ago; that the Greeks and Romans became acquainted with it at the beginning of our era, and that the latter carried it into Barbary and Spain, where it became partially naturalized by the effect of cultivation.

Lotus Jujube—Zizyphus lotus, Desfontaines.

The fruit of this jujube is not worthy of attention except from an historical point of view. It is said to have been the food of the lotus-eater, a people of the Lybian coast, of whom Herod and Herodotos954 have given a more or less accurate account. The inhabitants of this country must have been very poor or very temperate, for a berry the size of a small cherry, tasteless, or slightly sweet, would not satisfy ordinary men. There is no proof that the lotus-eaters cultivated this little tree or shrub. They doubtless gathered the fruit in the open country, for the species is common in the north of Africa. One edition of Theophrastus955 asserts, however, that there were some species of lotus without stones, which would imply cultivation. They were planted in gardens, as is still done in modern Egypt,956 but it does not seem to have been a common custom even among the ancients.

For the rest, widely different opinions have been held touching the lotus of the lotus-eaters,957 and it is needless to insist upon a point so obscure, in which so much must be allowed for the imagination of a poet and for popular ignorance.

The jujube tree is now wild in dry places from Egypt to Marocco, in the south of Spain, Terracina, and the neighbourhood of Palermo.958 In isolated Italian localities it has probably escaped from cultivation.

Indian Jujube959—Zizyphus jujube, Lamarck; ber among the Hindus and Anglo-Indians, masson in the Mauritius.

This jujube is cultivated further south than the common kind, but its area is equally extensive. The fruit is sometimes like an unripe cherry, sometimes like an olive, as is shown in the plate published by Bouton in Hooker’s Journal of Botany, i. pl. 140. The great number of known varieties indicates an ancient cultivation. It extends at the present day from Southern China, the Malay Archipelago, and Queensland, through Arabia and Egypt as far as Marocco, and even to Senegal, Guinea, and Angola.960 It grows also in Mauritius, but it does not appear to have been introduced into America as yet, unless perhaps into Brazil, as it seems from a specimen in my herbarium.961 The fruit is preferable to the common jujube, according to some writers.

It is not easy to know what was the habitation of the species before all cultivation, because the stones sow themselves readily and the plant becomes naturalized outside gardens.962 If we are guided by its abundance in a wild state, it would seem that Burmah and British India are its original abode. I have in my herbarium several specimens gathered by Wallich in the kingdom of Burmah, and Kurz has often seen it in the dry forests of that country, near Ava and Prome.963 Beddone admits the species to be wild in the forests of British India, but Brandis had only found it in the neighbourhood of native settlements.964 In the seventeenth century Rheede965 described this tree as wild on the Malabar coast, and botanists of the sixteenth century had received it from Bengal. In support of an Indian origin, I may mention the existence of three Sanskrit names, and of eleven other names in modern Indian languages.966

It had been recently introduced into the eastern islands of the Amboyna group when Rumphius was living there,967 and he says himself that it is an Indian species. It was perhaps originally in Sumatra and in other islands near to the Malay Peninsula. Ancient Chinese authors do not mention it; at least Bretschneider did not know of it. Its extension and naturalization to the east of the continent of India appear, therefore, to have been recent.

Its introduction into Arabia and Egypt appears to be of yet later date. Not only no ancient name is known, but Forskal, a hundred years ago, and Delile at the beginning of the present century, had not seen the species, of which Schweinfurth has recently spoken as cultivated. It must have spread to Zanzibar from Asia, and by degrees across Africa or in European vessels as far as the west coast. This must have been quite recently, as Robert Brown (Bot. of Congo) and Thonning did not see the species in Guinea.968

Cashew—Anacardium occidentale, Linnæus.

The most erroneous assertions about the origin of this species were formerly made,969 and in spite of what I said on the subject in 1855,970 I find them occasionally reproduced.

The French name Pommier d’acajou (mahogany apple tree) is as absurd as it is possible to be. It is a tree belonging to the order of Terebintaceæ or Anacardiaceæ, very different from the Rosaceæ and the Meliaceæ, to which the apple and the mahogany belong. The edible part is more like a pear than an apple, and botanically speaking is not a fruit, but the receptacle or support of the fruit, which resembles a large bean. The two names, French and English, are both derived from a name given to it by the natives of Brazil, acaju, acajaiba, quoted by early travellers.971 The species is certainly wild in the forests of tropical America, and indeed occupies a wide area in that region; it is found, for example, in Brazil, Guiana, the Isthmus of Panama, and the West Indies.972 Dr. Ernst973 believes it is only indigenous in the basin of the Amazon River, although he had seen it also in Cuba, Panama, Ecuador, and New Granada. His opinion is founded upon the absence of all mention of the plant in Spanish authors of the time of the Conquest—a negative proof, which establishes a mere probability.

Rheede and Rumphius had also indicated this plant in the south of Asia. The former says it is common on the Malabar coast.974 The existence of the same tropical arborescent species in Asia and America was so little probable, that it was at first suspected that there was a difference of species, or at least of variety; but this was not confirmed. Different historical and philological proofs have convinced me that its origin is not Asiatic.975 Moreover, Rumphius, who is always accurate, spoke of an ancient introduction by the Portuguese into the Malay Archipelago from America. The Malay name he gives, cadju, is American; that used at Amboyna means Portugal fruit, that of Macassar was taken from the resemblance of the fruit to that of the jambosa. Rumphius says that the species was not widely diffused in the islands. Garcia ab Orto did not find it at Goa in 1550, but Acosta afterwards saw it at Couchin, and the Portuguese propagated it in India and the Malay Archipelago. According to Blume and Miquel, the species is only cultivated in Java. Rheede, it is true, says it is abundant (provenit ubique) on the coast of Malabar, but he only quotes one name which seems to be Indian, kapa mava; all the others are derived from the American name. Piddington gives no Sanskrit name. Lastly, Anglo-Indian colonists, after some hesitation as to its origin, now admit the importation of the species from America at an early period. They add that it has become naturalized in the forests of British India.976

It is yet more doubtful that the tree is indigenous in Africa, indeed it is easy to disprove the assertion. Loureiro977 had seen the species on the east coast of this continent, but he supposed it to have been of American origin. Thonning had not seen it in Guinea, nor Brown in Congo.978 It is true that specimens from the last-named country and from the islands in the Gulf of Guinea were sent to the herbarium at Kew, but Oliver says it is cultivated there.979 A tree which occupies such a large area in America, and which has become naturalized in several districts of India within the last two centuries, would exist over a great extent of tropical Africa if it were indigenous in that quarter of the globe.

Mango—Mangifera indica, Linnæus.

Belonging to the same order as the Cashew, this tree nevertheless produces a true fruit, something the colour of the apricot.980

It is impossible to doubt that it is a native of the south of Asia or of the Malay Archipelago, when we see the multitude of varieties cultivated in these countries, the number of ancient common names, in particular a Sanskrit name,981 its abundance in the gardens of Bengal, of the Dekkan Peninsula, and of Ceylon, even in Rheede’s time. Its cultivation was less diffused in the direction of China, for Loureiro only mentions its existence in Cochin-China. According to Rumphius,982 it had been introduced into certain islands of the Asiatic Archipelago within the memory of living men. Forster does not mention it in his work on the fruits of the Pacific Islands at the time of Cook’s expedition. The name common in the Philippine Isles, manga,983 shows a foreign origin, for it is the Malay and Spanish name. The common name in Ceylon is ambe, akin to the Sanskrit amra, whence the Persian and Arab amb,984 the modern Indian names, and perhaps the Malay, mangka, manga, manpelaan, indicated by Rumphius. There are, however, other names used in the Sunda Islands, in the Moluccas, and in Cochin-China. The variety of these names argues an ancient introduction into the East Indian Archipelago, in spite of the opinion of Rumphius.

The Mangifera which this author had seen wild in Java, and Mangifera sylvatiea which Roxburgh had discovered at Silhet, are other species; but the true mango is indicated by modern authors as wild in the forests of Ceylon, the regions at the base of the Himalayas, especially towards the east, in Arracan, Pegu, and the Andaman Isles.985 Miquel does not mention it as wild in any of the islands of the Malay Archipelago. In spite of its growing in Ceylon, and the indications, less positive certainly, of Sir Joseph Hooker in the Flora of British India, the species is probably rare or only naturalized in the Indian Peninsula. The size of the stone is too great to allow of its being transported by birds, but the frequency of its cultivation causes a dispersion by man’s agency. If the mango is only naturalized in the west of British India, this must have occurred at a remote epoch, as the existence of a Sanskrit name shows. On the other hand, the peoples of Western Asia must have known it late, since they did not transport the species into Egypt or elsewhere towards the west.

It is cultivated at the present day in tropical Africa, and even in Mauritius and the Seychelles, where it has become to some extent naturalized in the woods.986

In the new world it was first introduced into Brazil, for the seeds were brought thence to Barbados in the middle of the last century.987 A French vessel was carrying some young trees from Bourbon to Saint Domingo in 1782, when it was taken by the English, who took them to Jamaica, where they succeeded wonderfully. When the coffee plantations were abandoned, at the time of the emancipation of the slaves, the mango, whose stones the negroes scattered everywhere, formed forests in every part of the islands, and these are now valued both for their shade and as a form of food.988 It was not cultivated in Cayenne in the time of Aublet, at the end of the eighteenth century, but now there are mangoes of the finest kind in this colony. They are grafted, and it is observed that their stones produce better fruit than that of the original stock.989

Tahiti Apple—Spondias dulcis, Forster.

This tree belongs to the family of the Anacardiaceæ, and is indigenous in the Society, Friendly, and Fiji Islands.990 The natives consumed quantities of the fruit at the time of Cook’s voyage. It is like a large plum, of the colour of an apple, and contains a stone covered with long hooked bristles.991 The flavour, according to travellers, is excellent. It is not among the fruits most widely diffused in tropical colonies. It is, however, cultivated in Mauritius and Bourbon, under the primitive Polynesian name evi or hevi,992 and in the West Indies. It was introduced into Jamaica in 1782, and thence into Saint Domingo. Its absence in many of the hot countries of Asia and Africa is probably owing to the fact that the species was discovered, only a century ago, in small islands which have no communications with other countries.

Strawberry—Fragaria vesca, Linnæus.

Our common strawberry is one of the most widely diffused plants, partly owing to the small size of its seeds, which birds, attracted by the fleshy part on which they are found, carry to great distances.

It grows wild in Europe, from Lapland and the Shetland Isles993 to the mountain ranges in the south; in Madeira, Spain, Sicily, and in Greece.994 It is also found in Asia, from Armenia and the north of Syria995 to Dahuria. The strawberries of the Himalayas and of Japan,996 which several authors have attributed to this species, do not perhaps belong to it,997 and this makes me doubt the assertion of a missionary998 that it is found in China. It is wild in Iceland,999 in the north-east of the United States,1000 round Fort Cumberland, and on the north-west coast,1001 perhaps even in the Sierra-Nevada of California.1002 Thus its area extends round the north pole, except in Eastern Siberia and the basin of the river Amur, since the species is not mentioned by Maximowicz in his Primitiæ Floræ Amurensis. In America its area is extended along the highlands of Mexico; for Fragaria mexicana, cultivated in the Jardin des Plantes, and examined by Gay, is F. vesca. It also grows round Quito, according to the same botanist, who is an authority on this question.1003

The Greeks and Romans did not cultivate the strawberry. Its cultivation was probably introduced in the fifteenth or sixteenth century. Champier, in the sixteenth century, speaks of it as a novelty in the north of France,1004 but it already existed in the south, and in England.1005

Transported into gardens in the colonies, the strawberry has become naturalized in a few cool localities far from dwellings. This is the case in Jamaica,1006 in Mauritius,1007 and in Bourbon, where some plants had been placed by Commerson on the table-land known as the Kaffirs’ Plain. Bory Saint-Vincent relates that in 1801 he found districts quite red with strawberries, and that it was impossible to cross them without staining the feet red with the juice, mixed with volcanic dust.1008 It is probable that similar cases of naturalization may be seen in Tasmania and New Zealand.

The genus Fragaria has been studied with more care than many others, by Duchesne (fils), the Comte de Lambertye, Jacques Gay, and especially by Madame Eliza Vilmorin, whose faculty of observation was worthy of the name she bore. A summary of their works, with excellent coloured plates, is published in the Jardin Fruitier du Muséum by Decaisne. These authors have overcome great difficulties in distinguishing the varieties and hybrids which are multiplied in gardens from the true species, and in defining these by well-marked characters. Some strawberries whose fruit is poor have been abandoned, and the finest are the result of the crossing of the species of Virginia and Chili, of which I am about to speak.

Virginian Strawberry—Fragaria virginiana, Ehrarht.

The scarlet strawberry of French gardens. This species, indigenous in Canada and in the eastern States of America, and of which one variety extends west as far as the Rocky Mountains, perhaps even to Oregon,1009 was introduced into English gardens in 1629.1010 It was much cultivated in France in the last century, but its hybrids with other species are now more esteemed.

Chili Strawberry—Fragaria Chiloensis, Duchesne.

A species common in Southern Chili, at Conception, Valdivia, and Chiloe,1011 and often cultivated in that country. It was brought to France by Frezier in the year 1715. Cultivated in the Museum of Natural History in France, it spread to England and elsewhere. The large size of the berry and its excellent flavour have produced by different crossings, especially with F. virginiana, the highly prized varieties Ananas, Victoria, Trollope, Rubis, etc.

Bird-Cherry—Prunus avium, Linnæus; Süsskirschbaum in German.

I use the word cherry because it is customary, and has no inconvenience when speaking of cultivated species or varieties, but the study of allied wild species confirms the opinion of Linnæus, that the cherries do not form a separate genus from the plums.

All the varieties of the cultivated cherry belong to two species, which are found wild: 1. Prunus avium, Linnæus, tall, with no suckers from the roots, leaves downy on the under side, the fruit sweet; 2. Prunus cerasus, Linnæus, shorter, with suckers from the roots, leaves glabrous, and fruit more or less sour or bitter.

The first of these species, from which the white and black cherries are developed, is wild in Asia; in the forest of Ghilan (north of Persia), in the Russian provinces to the south of the Caucasus and in Armenia;1012 in Europe in the south of Russia proper, and generally from the south of Sweden to the mountainous parts of Greece, Italy, and Spain.1013 It even exists in Algeria.1014

As we leave the district to the south of the Caspian and Black Seas, the bird-cherry becomes less common, less natural, and determined more perhaps by the birds which seek its fruit and carry the seeds from place to place.1015 It cannot be doubted that it was thus naturalized, from cultivation, in the north of India,1016 in many of the plains of the south of Europe, in Madeira,1017 and here and there in the United States;1018 but it is probable that in the greater part of Europe this took place in prehistoric times, seeing that the agency of birds was employed before the first migrations of nations, perhaps before there were men in Europe. Its area must have extended in this region as the glaciers diminished.

The common names in ancient languages have been the subject of a learned article by Adolphe Pictet,1019 but nothing relative to the origin of the species can be deduced from them; and besides, the different species and varieties have often been confused in popular nomenclature. It is far more important to know whether archæology can tell us anything about the presence of the bird-cherry in Europe in prehistoric times.

Heer gives an illustration of the stones of Prunus avium, in his paper on the lake-dwellings of Western Switzerland.1020 From what he was kind enough to write to me, April 14, 1881, these stones were found in the peat formed above the ancient deposits of the age of stone. De Mortillet1021 found similar cherry-stones in the lake-dwellings of Bourget belonging to an epoch not very remote, more recent than the stone age. Dr. Gross sent me some from the locality, also comparatively recent, of Corcelette on Lake Neuchâtel, and Strobel and Pigorini discovered some in the “terramare” of Parma.1022 All these are settlements posterior to the stone age, and perhaps belonging to historic time. If no more ancient stones of this species are found in Europe, it will seem probable that naturalization took place after the Aryan migrations.

Sour Cherry—Prunus cerasus, Linnæus; Cerasus vulgaris, Miller; Baumweichsel, Sauerkirschen, in German.

The Montmorency and griotte cherries, and several other kinds known to horticulturists, are derived from this species.1023

Hohenacker1024 saw Prunus cerasus at Lenkoran, near the Caspian Sea, and Koch1025 in the forests of Asia Minor, that is to say, in the north-east of that country, as that was the region in which he travelled. Ancient authors found it at Elisabethpol and Erivan, according to Ledebour.1026 Grisebach1027 indicates it on Mount Olympus of Bithynia, and adds that it is nearly wild on the plains of Macedonia. The true and really ancient habitation seems to extend from the Caspian Sea to the environs of Constantinople; but in this very region Prunus avium is more common. Indeed, Boissier and Tchihatcheff do not appear to have seen P. cerasus even in the Pontus, though they received or brought back several specimens of P. avium.1028

In the north of India, P. cerasus exists only as a cultivated plant.1029 The Chinese do not appear to have been acquainted with our two kinds of cherry. Hence it may be assumed that it was not very early introduced into India, and the absence of a Sanskrit name confirms this. We have seen that, according to Grisebach, P. cerasus is nearly wild in Macedonia. It was said to be wild in the Crimea, but Steven1030 only saw it cultivated; and Rehmann1031 gives only the allied species, P. chamæcerasus, Jacquin, as wild in the south of Russia. I very much doubt its wild character in any locality north of the Caucasus. Even in Greece, where Fraas said he saw this tree wild, Heldreich only knows it as a cultivated species.1032 In Dalmatia,1033 a particular variety or allied species, P. Marasca, is found really wild; it is used in making Maraschino wine. P. cerasus is wild in mountainous parts of Italy1034 and in the centre of France,1035 but farther to the west and north, and in Spain, the species is only found cultivated, and naturalized here and there as a bush. P. cerasus, more than the bird-cherry, evidently presents itself in Europe, as a foreign tree not completely naturalized.

None of the often-quoted passages1036 in Theophrastus, Pliny, and other ancient authors appear to apply to P. cerasus.1037 The most important, that of Theophrastus, belongs to Prunus avium, because of the height of the tree, a character which distinguishes it from P. cerasus. Kerasos being the name for the bird-cherry in Theophrastus, as now kerasaia among the modern Greeks, I notice a linguistic proof of the antiquity of P. cerasus. The Albanians, descendants of the Pelasgians, call the latter vyssine, an ancient name which reappears in the German Wechsel, and the Italian visciolo.1038 As the Albanians have also the name kerasie for P. avium, it is probable that their ancestors very clearly distinguished the two species by different names, perhaps before the arrival of the Hellenes in Greece.

Another indication of antiquity may be seen in Virgil (Geor. ii. 17)—

“Pullulat ab radice aliis densissima silva Ut cerasis ulmisque”—

which applies to P. cerasus, not to P. avium.

Two paintings of the cherry tree were found at Pompeii, but it seems that it cannot be discovered to which of the two species they should be attributed.1039 Comes calls them Prunus cerasus.

Any archæological discovery would be more convincing. The stones of the two species present a difference in the furrow or groove, which has not escaped the observation of Heer and Sordelli. Unfortunately, only one stone of P. cerasus has been found in the prehistoric settlements of Italy and Switzerland, and what is more, it is not quite certain from what stratum it was taken. It appears that it was a non-archæological stratum.1040

From all these data, somewhat contradictory and sufficiently vague, I am inclined to admit that Prunus cerasus was known and already becoming naturalized at the beginning of Greek civilization, and a little later in Italy before the epoch when Lucullus brought a cherry tree from Asia Minor. Pages might be transcribed from authors, even modern ones, who attribute, after Pliny, the introduction of the cherry into Italy to this rich Roman, in the year 65 B.C. Since this error is perpetuated by its incessant repetition in classical schools, it must once more be said that cherry trees (at least the bird-cherry) existed in Italy before Lucullus, and that the famous gourmet did not need to go far to seek the species with sour or bitter fruit. I have no doubt that he pleased the Romans with a good variety cultivated in the Pontus, and that cultivators hastened to propagate it by grafting, but Lucullus’ share in the matter was confined to this.

From what is now known of Kerasunt and the ancient names of the cherry tree, I venture to maintain, contrary to the received opinion, that it was a variety of the bird-cherry of which the fleshy fruit is of a sweet flavour. I am inclined to think so because Kerasos in Theophrastus is the name of Prunus avium, which is far the commoner of the two in Asia Minor. The town of Kerasunt took its name from the tree, and it is probable that the abundance of Prunus avium in the neighbouring woods had induced the inhabitants to seek the trees which yielded the best fruits in order to plant them in their gardens. Certainly, if Lucullus brought fine white-heart cherries to Rome, his countrymen who only knew the little wild cherry may well have said, “It is a fruit which we have not.” Pliny affirms nothing more.

I must not conclude without suggesting a hypothesis about the two kinds of cherry. They differ but little in character, and, what is very rare, their two ancient habitations, which are most clearly proved, are similar (from the Caspian Sea to Western Anatolia). The two species have spread towards the West, but unequally. That which is commonest in its original home and the stronger of the two (P. avium) has extended further and at an earlier epoch, and has become better naturalized P. cerasus is, therefore, perhaps derived from the other in prehistoric times. I come thus, by a different road, to an idea suggested by Caruel;1041 only, instead of saying that it would perhaps be better to unite them now in one species, I consider them actually distinct, and content myself with supposing a descent, which for the rest it would not be easy to prove.

Cultivated Plums.

Pliny1042 speaks of the immense quantity of plums known in his time: ingens turba prunorum. Horticulturists now number more than three hundred. Some botanists have tried to attribute these to distinct wild species, but they have not always agreed, and judging from the specific names especially they seem to have had very different ideas. This diversity is on two heads; first as to the descent of a given cultivated variety, and secondly as to the distinction of the wild forms into species or varieties.

I do not pretend to classify the innumerable cultivated forms, and I think that labour useless when dealing with the question of geographical origin, for the differences lie principally in the shape, size, colour, and taste of the fruit, in characters, that is to say, which it has been the interest of horticulturists to cultivate when they occur, and even to create as far as it was in their power to do so. It is better to insist upon the distinction of the forms observed in a wild state, especially upon those from which man derives no advantage, and which have probably remained as they were before the existence of gardens.

It is probably only for about thirty years that botanists have given really comparative characters for the three species or varieties which exist in nature.1043 They may be summed up as follows:—

Prunus domestica, Linnæus. Tree or tall shrub, without thorns; young branches glabrous; flowers appearing with the leaves, their peduncles usually downy; fruit pendulous, ovoid and of a sweet flavour.

Prunus insititia, Linnæus. Tree or tall shrub, without thorns; young shoots covered with a velvet down; flowers appearing with the leaves, with peduncles covered with a fine down, or glabrous; fruit pendulous, round or slightly elliptical, of a sweet flavour.

Prunus spinosa, Linnæus. A thorny shrub, with branches spreading out at right angles; young shoots downy; flowers appearing before the leaves; pedicles glabrous; fruit upright, round, and very sour.

This third form, so common in our hedges (sloe or blackthorn), is very different from the other two. Therefore, unless we interpret by hypothesis what may have happened before all observation, it seems to me impossible to consider the three forms as constituting one and the same species, unless we can show transitions from one to the other in those organs which have not been modified by cultivation, and hitherto this has not been done. At most the fusion of the two first categories can be admitted. The two forms with naturally sweet fruit occur in few countries. These must have tempted cultivators more than Prunus spinosa, whose fruit is so sour. It is, therefore, in these that we must seek to find the originals of cultivated plums. For greater clearness I shall speak of them as two species.1044

Common Plum—Prunus domestica, Linnæus; Zwetchen in German.

Several botanists1045 have found this variety wild throughout Anatolia, the region to the south of the Caucasus and Northern Persia, in the neighbourhood of Mount Elbruz, for example.

I know of no proof for the localities of Kashmir, the country of the Kirghis and of China, which are mentioned in some floras. The species is often doubtful, and it is probably rather Prunus insititia; in other cases it is its true and ancient wild character which is uncertain, for the stones have evidently been dispersed from cultivation. Its area does not appear to extend as far as Lebanon, although the plums cultivated at Damascus (damascenes, or damsons) have a reputation which dates from the days of Pliny. It is supposed that this was the species referred to by Dioscorides1046 under the name of Syrian coccumelea, growing at Damascus. Karl Koch relates that the merchants trading on the borders of China told him that the species was common in the forests of the western part of the empire. It is true that the Chinese have cultivated different kinds of plums from time immemorial, but we do not know them well enough to judge of them, and we cannot be sure that they are indigenous. As none of our kinds of plum has been found wild in Japan or in the basin of the river Amur, it is very probable that the species seen in China are different to ours. This appears also to be the result of Bretschneider’s statements.1047

It is very doubtful if Prunus domestica is indigenous in Europe. In the south, where it is given, it grows chiefly in hedges, near dwellings, with all the appearance of a tree scarcely naturalized, and maintained here and there by the constant bringing of stones from plantations. Authors who have seen the species in the East do not hesitate to say that it is “subspontaneous.” Fraas1048 affirms that it is not wild in Greece, and this is confirmed as far as Attica is concerned by Heldreich.1049 Steven1050 says the same for the Crimea. If this is the case near Asia Minor, it must be the more readily admitted for the rest of Europe.

In spite of the abundance of plums cultivated formerly by the Romans, no kind is found represented in the frescoes at Pompeii.1051 Neither has Prunus domestica been found among the remains of the lake-dwellings of Italy, Switzerland, and Savoy, where, however, stones of Prunus insititia and spinosa have been discovered. From these facts, and the small number of words attributable to this species in Greek authors, it may be inferred that its half-wild or half-naturalized state dates in Europe from two thousand years at most.

Prunes and damsons are ranked with this species.

Bullace—Prunus insititia, Linnæus;1052 Pflauenbaum and Haferschlehen in German.

This kind of plum grows wild in the south of Europe.1053 It has also been found in Cilicia, Armenia, to the south of the Caucasus, and in the province of Talysch near the Caspian Sea.1054 It is especially in Turkey in Europe and to the south of the Caucasus that it appears to be truly wild. In Italy and in Spain it is perhaps less so, although trustworthy authors who have seen the plant growing have no doubt about it. In the localities named north of the Alps, even as far as Denmark, it is probably naturalized from cultivation. The species is commonly found in hedges not far from dwellings, and apparently not truly wild.

All this agrees with archæological and historical data. The ancient Greeks distinguished the Coccumelea of their country from those of Syria,1055 whence it is inferred that the former were Prunus insititia. This seems the more likely that the modern Greeks call it coromeleia.1056 The Albanians say corombile,1057 which has led some people to suppose an ancient Pelasgian origin. For the rest, we must not insist upon the common names of the plum which each nation may have given to one or another species, perhaps also to some cultivated variety, without any rule. The names which have been much commented upon in learned works generally, appear to me to apply to any plum or plum tree without having any very defined meaning.

No stones of P. insititia have yet been found in the terra-mare of Italy, but Heer has described and given illustrations of some which were found in the lake-dwellings of Robenhausen.1058 The species does not seem to be now indigenous in this part of Switzerland, but we must not forget that, as we saw in the history of flax, the lake-dwellers of the canton of Zurich, in the age of stone, had communications with Italy. These ancient Swiss were not hard to please in the matter of food, for they also gathered the berries of the blackthorn, which are, as we think, uneatable. It is probable that they ate them cooked.

Apricot—Prunus armeniaca, Linnæus; Armenica vulgaris, Lamarck.

The Greeks and Romans received the apricot about the beginning of the Christian era. Unknown in the time of Theophrastus, Dioscorides1059 mentions it under the name of mailon armeniacon. He says that the Latins called it praikokion. It is, in fact, one of the fruits mentioned briefly by Pliny,1060 under the name of præcocium, so called from the precocity of the species.1061 Its Armenian origin is indicated by the Greek name, but this name might mean only that the species was cultivated in Armenia. Modern botanists have long had good reason to believe that the species is wild in that country. Pallas, Güldenstädt, and Hohenacker say they found it in the neighbourhood of the Caucasus Mountains, on the north, on the banks of the Terek, and to the south between the Caspian and Black Seas.1062 Boissier1063 admits all these localities, but without saying anything about the wild character of the species. He saw a specimen gathered by Hohenacker, near Elisabethpol. On the other hand, Tchihatcheff1064 who has crossed Anatolia and Armenia several times, does not seem to have seen the wild apricot; and what is still more significant, Karl Koch, who travelled through the region to the south of the Caucasus, in order to observe facts of this nature, expresses himself as follows:1065 “Native country unknown. At least, during my long sojourn in Armenia, I nowhere found the apricot wild, and I have rarely seen it even cultivated.”

A traveller, W. J. Hamilton,1066 said he found it wild near Orgou and Outch Hisar in Anatolia: but this assertion has not been verified by a botanist. The supposed wild apricot of the ruins of Baalbek, described by Eusèbe de Salle1067 is, from what he says of the leaf and fruit, totally different to the common apricot. Boissier, and the different collectors who sent him plants from Syria and Lebanon, do not appear to have seen the species. Spach1068 asserts that it is indigenous in Persia, but he gives no proof. Boissier and Buhse1069 do not mention it in their list of the plants of Transcaucasia and Persia. It is useless to seek its origin in Africa. The apricots which Reynier1070 says he saw, “almost wild,” in Upper Egypt must have sprung from stones grown in cultivated ground, as is seen in Algeria.1071 Schweinfurth and Ascherson,1072 in their catalogue of the plants of Egypt and Abyssinia, only mention the species as cultivated. Besides, if it had existed formerly in the north of Africa it would have been early known to the Hebrews and the Romans. Now there is no Hebrew name, and Pliny says its introduction at Rome took place thirty years before he wrote.

Carrying our researches eastward, we find that Anglo-Indian botanists1073 are agreed in considering that the apricot, which is generally cultivated in the north of India and in Thibet, is not wild in those regions; but they add that it has a tendency to become naturalized, and that it is found upon the site of ruined villages. Messrs. Schlagintweit brought specimens from the northwest provinces of India, and from Thibet, which Westmael verified,1074 but he was kind enough to write to me that he cannot affirm that it was wild, since the collector’s label gives no information on that head.

Roxburgh,1075 who did not neglect the question of origin, says, speaking of the apricot, “native of China as well as the west of Asia.” I read in Dr. Bretschneider’s curious little work,1076 drawn up at Pekin, the following passage, which seems to me to decide the question in favour of a Chinese origin:—“Sing, as is well known, is the apricot (Prunus armeniaca). The character (a Chinese sign printed on p. 10) does not exist as indicating a fruit, either in the Shu-king, or in the Shi-king, Cihouli, etc., but the Shan-hai-king says that several sings grow upon the hills (here a Chinese character). Besides, the name of the apricot is represented by a particular sign which may show that it is indigenous in China.” The Shan-hai-king is attributed to the Emperor Yü, who lived in 2205-2198 B.C. Decaisne,1077 who was the first to suspect the Chinese origin of the apricot, has recently received from Dr. Bretschneider some specimens accompanied by the following note:—“No. 24, apricot wild in the mountains of Pekin, where it grows in abundance; the fruit is small (an inch and a quarter in diameter), the skin red and yellow; the flesh salmon colour, sour, but eatable. No. 25, the stone of the apricot cultivated round Pekin. The fruit is twice as large as that of the wild tree.”1078 Decaisne adds, in the letter he was good enough to write to me, “In shape and surface the stones are exactly like those of our small apricots; they are smooth and not pitted.” The leaves he sent me are certainly those of the apricot.

The apricot is not mentioned in Japan, or in the basin of the river Amoor.1079 Perhaps the cold of the winter is too great. If we recollect the absence of communication in ancient times between China and India, and the assertions that the plant is indigenous in both countries, we are at first tempted to believe that the ancient area extended from the north-west of India to China. However, if we wish to adopt this hypothesis, we must also admit that the culture of the apricot spread very late towards the West.1080 For no Sanskrit or Hebrew name is known, but only a Hindu name, zard alu, and a Persian name, mischmisch, which has passed into Arabic.1081 How is it to be supposed that so excellent a fruit, and one which grows in abundance in Western Asia, spread so slowly from the north-west of India towards the Græco-Roman world? The Chinese knew it two or three thousand years before the Christian era. Changkien went as far as Bactriana, a century before our era, and he was the first to make the West known to his fellow-countrymen.1082 It was then, perhaps, that the apricot was introduced in Western Asia, and that it was cultivated and became naturalized here and there in the north-west of India, and at the foot of the Caucasus, by the scattering of the stones beyond the limits of the plantations.

Almond—Amygdalus communis, Linnæus; Pruni species, Baillon; Prunus Amygdalus, Hooker.

The almond grows apparently wild or half wild in the warm, dry regions of the Mediterranean basin and of western temperate Asia. As the nuts from cultivated trees naturalize the species very easily, we must have recourse to various indications to discern its ancient home.

We may first discard the notion of its origin in Eastern Asia. Japanese floras make no mention of the almond. That which M. de Bonge saw cultivated in the north of China was the Persica Davidiana.1083 Dr. Bretschneider,1084 in his classical work, tells us that he has never seen the almond cultivated in China, and that the compilation entitled Pent-sao, published in the tenth or eleventh century of our era, describes it as a tree of the country of the Mahometans, which signifies the north-west of India, or Persia.

Anglo-Indian botanists1085 say that the almond is cultivated in the cool parts of India, but some add that it does not thrive, and that many almonds are brought from Persia.1086 No Sanskrit name is known, nor even any in the languages derived from Sanskrit. Evidently the north-west of India is not the original home of the species.

On the other hand, there are many localities in the region extending from Mesopotamia and Turkestan to Algeria, where excellent botanists have found the almond tree quite wild. Boissier1087 has seen specimens gathered in rocky ground in Mesopotamia, Aderbijan, Turkestan, Kurdistan, and in the forests of the Anti-Lebanon. Karl Koch1088 has not found it wild to the south of the Caucasus, nor Tchihatcheff in Asia Minor. Cosson1089 found natural woods of almond trees near Saida in Algeria. It is also regarded as wild on the coasts of Sicily and of Greece;1090 but there, and still more in the localities in which it occurs in Italy, Spain, and France, it is probable, and almost certain, that it springs from the casual dispersal of the nuts from cultivation.

The antiquity of its existence in Western Asia is proved by Hebrew names for the almond tree—schaked, luz or lus (which recurs in the Arabic louz), and schekedim for the nut.1091 The Persians have another name, badam, but I do not know how old this is. Theophrastus and Dioscorides1092 mention the almond by an entirely different name, amugdalai, translated by the Latins into amygdalus. It may be inferred from this that the Greeks did not receive the species from the interior of Asia, but found it in their own country, or at least in Asia Minor. The almond tree is represented in several frescoes found at Pompeii.1093 Pliny1094 doubts whether the species was known in Italy in Cato’s time, because it was called the Greek nut. It is very possible that the almond was introduced into Italy from the Greek islands. Almonds have not been found in the terra-mare of the neighbourhood of Parma, even in the upper layers.

The late introduction of the species into Italy, and the absence of naturalization in Sardinia and Spain,1095 incline me to doubt whether it is really indigenous in the north of Africa and Sicily. In the latter countries it was more probably naturalized some centuries ago. In confirmation of this hypothesis, I note that the Berber name of the almond, talouzet,1096 is evidently connected with the Arabic louz, that is to say with the language of the conquerors who came after the Romans. In Western Asia, on the contrary, and even in some parts of Greece, it may be regarded as indigenous from prehistoric time. I do not say primitive, for everything was preceded by something else. I remark finally that the difference between bitter and sweet almonds was known to the Greeks and even to the Hebrews.

Peach—Amygdalus persica, Linnæus; Persica vulgaris, Miller; Prunus persica, Bentham and Hooker.

I will quote the article in which I formerly1097 attributed a Chinese origin to the peach, a contrary opinion to that which prevailed at the time, and which people who are not on a par with modern science continue to reproduce. I will afterwards give the facts discovered since 1855.

“The Greeks and Romans received the peach shortly after the beginning of the Christian era. The names persica, malum persicum, indicate whence they had it. I need not dwell upon those well-known facts.1098 Several kinds of peach are now cultivated in the north of India,1099 but, what is remarkable, no Sanskrit name is known;1100 whence we may infer that its existence and its cultivation are of no great antiquity in these regions. Roxburgh, who is usually careful to give the modern Indian names, only mentions Arab and Chinese names. Piddington gives no Indian name, and Royle only Persian names. The peach does not succeed, or requires the greatest care to ensure success, in the north-east of India.1101 In China, on the contrary, its cultivation dates from the remotest antiquity. A number of superstitious ideas and of legends about the properties of its different varieties exist in that country.1102 These varieties are very numerous;1103 and in particular the singular variety with compressed or flattened fruit,1104 which appears to be further removed than any other from the natural state of the peach; lastly, a simple name, to, is given to the common peach.1105

“From all these facts, I am inclined to believe that the peach is of Chinese rather than of western Asiatic origin. If it had existed in Persia or Armenia from all time, the knowledge and cultivation of so pleasant a fruit would have spread earlier into Asia Minor and Greece. The expedition of Alexander probably was the means of making it known to Theophrastus (332 B.C.), who speaks of it as a Persian fruit. Perhaps this vague idea of the Greeks dates from the retreat of the ten thousand (401 B.C.); but Xenophon does not mention the peach. Nor do the Hebrew writings speak of it. The peach has no Sanskrit name, yet the peoples who spoke this language came into India from the north-west; that is to say, from the generally received home of the species. On this hypothesis, how are we to account for the fact that neither the Greeks of the early times of Greece, nor the Hebrews, nor the Sanskrit-speaking peoples, who all radiated from the upper part of the Euphrates valley or communicated with it, did not cultivate the peach? On the other hand, it is very possible that the stones of a fruit tree cultivated in China from the remotest times, should have been carried over the mountains from the centre of Asia into Kashmir, Bokhara, and Persia. The Chinese had very early discovered this route. The importation would have taken place between the epoch of the Sanskrit emigrations and the relations of the Persians with the Greeks. The cultivation of the peach, once established in Persia, would have easily spread on the one side towards the west; on the other, through Cabul towards the north of India, where it is not so very ancient.

Notes in this chapter

Note 1 · The word fruit is here employed in the vulgar sense, for any fleshy part which enlarges after the flowering. In the strictly botanical sense Note 2 · A. squamosa is figured in Descourtilz, Flore des Antilles, ii. pl. 83; Hooker’s Bot. Mag., 3095; and Tussac, Flore des Antilles, iii. pl. 4.Note 3 · A. de Candolle, Géogr. Bot. Rais., p. 859.Note 4 · Aug. de Saint-Hilaire, Plantes usuelles des Brésiliens, bk. vi. p. 5.Note 5 · Alph. de Candolle, Mem. Soc. Phys. et d’Hist. Nat. de Genève.Note 6 · Ibid., p. 19 of Mem. printed separately.Note 7 · See Botany of Congo, and the German translation of Brown’s works, which has alphabetical tables.Note 8 · Royle, Ill. Himal., p. 60.Note 9 · Webb, in Fl. Nigr., p. 97.Note 10 · Ibid., p. 204.Note 11 · Thonning, Pl. Guin.Note 12 · Brown, Congo, p. 6.Note 13 · Guillemin, Perrottet, and Richard, Tentamen Fl. Seneg.Note 14 · Sloane, Jam., ii. p. 168.Note 15 · P. Brown, Jam., p. 257.Note 16 · Macfadyen, Fl. Jam., p. 9.Note 17 · Martius, Fl. Bras., fasc. ii. p. 15.Note 18 · Splitgerber, Nederl. Kruidk. Arch., ii. p. 230.Note 19 · A. de Candolle, Géogr. Bot. Rais., chap. x.Note 20 · Rumphius, i. p. 139.Note 21 · Forster, Plantæ Esculentæ.Note 22 · Rheede, Malabar, iii. p. 22.Note 23 · Loureiro, Fl. Cochin., p. 427.Note 24 · Blanco, Fl. Filip.Note 25 · This depends upon the opinion formed with respect to A. glabra, Forskal (A. Asiatica, B. Dun. Anon., p. 71; A. Forskalii, D. C. Syst., i. p.Note 26 · Roxburgh, Fl. Ind., edit. 1832, v. ii. p. 657.Note 27 · Piddington, Index, p. 6.Note 28 · Royle, Ill. Him., p. 60.Note 29 · Rheede and Rumphius, i. p. 139.Note 30 · Hernandez, pp. 348, 454.Note 31 · Dunal, Mem. Anon., p. 70.Note 32 · Martius, Fl. Bras., fasc. ii. p. 15.Note 33 · Hence the generic name Anona, which Linnæus changed to Annona (provision), because he did not wish to have any savage name, and did not mind Note 34 · Martius, Fl. Bras., fasc. ii. p. 15.Note 35 · Marcgraf, Brazil, p. 94.Note 36 · See Baker, Flora of Mauritius, p. 3. The identity admitted by Oliver, Fl. Trop. Afr., i. p. 16, of the Anona palustris of America with that Note 37 · Hooker, Fl. of Brit. Ind., i. p. 78; Miquel, Fl. Indo-Batava, i. part 2, p. 33; Kurz, Forest Flora of Brit. Burm., i. p. 46; Stewart and Bra Note 38 · Grisebach, Fl. of Brit. W. I. Isles, p. 5.Note 39 · Eggers, Flora of St. Croix and Virgin Isles, p. 23.Note 40 · Triana and Planchon, Prodr. Fl. Novo-Granatensis, p. 29; Sagot, Journ. Soc. d’Hortic., 1872.Note 41 · Warming, Symbolæ ad. Fl. Bras., xvi. p. 434.Note 42 · Figured in Descourtilz, Fl. Med. des. Antilles, ii. pl. 87, and in Tussac, Fl. des Antilles, ii. p. 24.Note 43 · Richard, Plantes Vasculaires de Cuba, p. 29; Swartz, Obs., p. 221; P. Brown, Jamaica, p. 255; Macfadyen, Fl. of Jam., p. 7; Eggers, Fl. of S Note 44 · Martius, Fl. Brasil, fasc. ii. p. 4; Splitgerber, Pl. de Surinam, in Nederl. Kruidk. Arch., i. p. 226.Note 45 · Richard, Macfadyen, Grisebach, Eggers, Swartz, Maycock, Fl. Barbad., p. 233.Note 46 · Seemann, Bot. of the Herald, p. 75.Note 47 · Triana and Planchon, Prodr. Fl. Novo-Granat., p. 29.Note 48 · Oliver, Fl. Trop. Afr., i. p. 15.Note 49 · Sir J. Hooker, Fl. Brit. Ind., i. p. 78.Note 50 · De Candolle, Géogr. Bot. Rais., p. 863.Note 51 · Feuillée, Obs., iii. p. 23, t. 17.Note 52 · Macfadyen, Fl. Jam., p. 10.Note 53 · Martius, Fl. Bras., fasc. iii. p. 15.Note 54 · Hooker, Fl. Nigr., p. 205.Note 55 · Nov. Act. Nat. Cur., xix. suppl. 1.Note 56 · Richard, Plant. Vasc. de Cuba; Grisebach, Fl. Brit. W. Ind. Is.; Hemsley, Biologia Centr. Am., p. 118; Kunth, in Humboldt and Bonpland, Nova Note 57 · Gay, Flora Chil., i. p. 66.Note 58 · Molina, French trans.Note 59 · Gallesio, Traité du Citrus, in 8vo, Paris, 1811; Risso and Poiteau, Histoire Naturelle des Orangers, 1818, in folio, 109 plates.Note 60 · Hooker, Fl. of Brit. Ind., i. p. 515.Note 61 · Brandis, Forest Flora, p. 50.Note 62 · For a work of this nature, the first step would be to publish good figures of wild species, showing particularly the fruit, which is not see Note 63 · Bretschneider, On the Study and Value of Chinese Botanical Works, p. 55.Note 64 · Acosta, Hist. Nat. des Indes, Fr. trans. 1598, p. 187.Note 65 · Roxburgh, Flora Indica, edit. 1832 iii. p. 393.Note 66 · Rumphius, Hortus Ambeinensis, ii. p. 98.Note 67 · Miquel, Flora Indo-Batava, i. pt. 2, p. 526.Note 68 · Bretschneider, Study and Value, etc.Note 69 · Loureiro, Fl. Cochin., ii. p. 572. For another species of the genus, he says that it is cultivated and non-cultivated, p. 569.Note 70 · Forster, De Plantis Esculentis Oceani Australis, p. 35.Note 71 · Seemann, Flora Vitiensis, p. 33.Note 72 · Plukenet, Almagestes, p. 239; Sloane, Jamaica, i. p. 41.Note 73 · Cedrat à gros fruit of Duhamel, Traité des Arbres, edit. 2, vii. p. 68, pl. 22.Note 74 · Royle, Ill. Himal., p. 129; Brandis, Forest Flora, p. 52; Hooker, Fl. of Brit. Ind., i. p. 514.Note 75 · Franchet and Savatier, Enum. Plant. Jap., p. 129.Note 76 · Miquel, Flora Indo-Batava, i. pt. 2, p. 528.Note 77 · Theophrastus, l. 4, c. 4.Note 78 · Bodæus, in Theophrastus, edit. 1644, pp. 322, 343; Risso, Traité du Citrus, p. 198; Targioni, Cenni Storici, p. 196.Note 79 · Dioscorides, i. p. 166.Note 80 · Targioni, Cenni Storici.Note 81 · Targioni, p. 217.Note 82 · Gallesio, Traité du Citrus, pp. 32, 67, 355, 357.Note 83 · Macfadyen, Flora of Jamaica, p. 129.Note 84 · Quoted in Grisebach’s Veget. Karaiben, p. 34.Note 85 · Ernst, in Seemann, Journ. of Bot., 1867, p. 272.Note 86 · Roxburgh, Fl. Indica, edit. 1832, vol. ii. p. 392; Piddington, Index.Note 87 · Gallesio, p. 122.Note 88 · In the modern languages of India the Sanskrit name has been applied to the sweet orange, so says Brandis, by one of those transpositions whi Note 89 · Gallesio, pp. 122, 247, 248.Note 90 · Gallesio, p. 240. Goeze, Beitrag zur Kenntniss der Orangengewächse, 1874, p. 13, quotes early Portuguese travellers on this head.Note 91 · Wallich, Catalogue, No. 6384.Note 92 · Hooker, Fl. of Brit. Ind., i. p. 515.Note 93 · Loureiro, Fl. Cochin., p. 571.Note 94 · Royle, Illustr. of Himal., p. 129. He quotes Turner, Journey to Thibet, pp. 20, 387.Note 95 · Loureiro, Fl. Cochin., p. 569.Note 96 · Gallesio, p. 321.Note 97 · The date of this statuto is given by Targioni, on p. 205 of the Cenni Storici, as 1379, and on p. 213 as 1309. The errata do not notice this Note 98 · Goeze, Ein Beitrag zur Kenntniss der Orangengewächse. Hamburg, 1874, p. 26.Note 99 · Rumphius, Amboin., ii. c. 42.Note 100 · Forster, Plantis Esculentis, p. 35.Note 101 · Bretschneider, On the Study and Value, etc., p. 11.Note 102 · Rumphius, Amboin., ii. pls. 34, 35, where, however, the form of the fruit is not that of our mandarin.Note 103 · Loureiro, Fl. Cochin., p. 570.Note 104 · Kurz, Forest Fl. of Brit. Bur.Note 105 · Royle, Ill. Himal., p. 133, and Roxburgh, Fl. Ind., ii. p. 618.Note 106 · Macfadyen, Flora of Jamaica, p. 134.Note 107 · Rumphius, Amboin., i. p. 133; Miquel, Plantæ Junghun., i. p. 290; Flora Indo-Batava, i. pt. 2, p. 506.Note 108 · Hooker, Flora of Brit. Ind., i. p. 260.Note 109 · Ernst in Seemann, Journal of Botany, 1867, p. 273; Triana and Planchon, Prodr. Fl. Novo-Granat., p. 285.Note 110 · Sloane, Jamaica, i. p. 123; Jacquin, Amer., p. 268; Grisebach, Fl. of Brit. W. Ind. Isles, p. 118.Note 111 · A. de Candolle, Géogr. Bot. Rais., p. 768.Note 112 · Flora of Brit. Ind., i. p. 343.Note 113 · Jacquin, Observationes, iii. p. 11.Note 114 · Marcgraf, Hist. Plant., p. 32, with illustrations.Note 115 · Schweinfurth and Ascherson, Aufzählung, p. 265, under the name abelmoschus.Note 116 · Flückiger and Hanbury, Pharmacographia, p. 86. The description is in Ebn Baithar, Sondtheimer’s trans., i. p. 118.Note 117 · Unger, Die Pflanzen des Alten Ægyptens, p. 50.Note 118 · Grisebach, Végét. du Globe, French trans. by Tchihatcheff, i. pp. 162, 163, 442; Munby, Catal. Alger; Ball, Fl. Maroc. Spicel, p. 392.Note 119 · Adolphe Pictet, Origines Indo-Europ. edit. 2, vol. 1, p. 295. quotes several travellers for these regions, among others Wood’s Journey to th Note 120 · These are figured in Heer’s Pflanzen der Pfahlbauten, p. 24, fig. 11.Note 121 · Ragazzoni, Rivista Arch. della Prov. di Como, 1880, fasc. 17, p. 30.Note 122 · Heer, ibid.Note 123 · Planchon, Étude sur les Tufs de Montpellier, 1864, p. 63.Note 124 · De Saporta, La Flore des Tufs Quaternaires de Provence, 1867, pp. 15, 27.Note 125 · Kolenati, Bulletin de la Société Impériale des Naturalistes de Moscou, 1846, p. 279.Note 126 · Regel, Acta Horti Imp. Petrop., 1873. In this short review of the genus, M. Regel gives it as his opinion that Vitis vinifera is a hybrid be Note 127 · Ad. Pictet, Origines Indo-Eur., 2nd edit., vol. i. pp. 298-321.Note 128 · M. Delchevalerie, in l’Illustration Horticole, 1881, p. 28. He mentions in particular the tomb of Phtah-Hotep, who lived at Memphis 4000 B.C Note 129 · Bretschneider, Study and Value, etc., p. 16.Note 130 · Pliny, Hist., lib. 15, c. 14.Note 131 · Bertoloni, Fl. Ital., ii. p. 665; Gussone, Syn. Fl. Sicul., ii. p. 276.Note 132 · Willkomm and Lange, Prod. Fl. Hisp., iii. p. 480; Desfontaines, Fl. Atlant., i. p. 200; Boissier, Fl. Orient., ii. p. 12; J. Hooker, Fl. Bri Note 133 · Bretschneider, Study and Value, etc., p. 11.Note 134 · Zizyphus chinensis of some authors is the same species.Note 135 · Brandis, Forest Flora of British India, p. 84.Note 136 · Lenz, Botanik der Alten, p. 651.Note 137 · Heldreich, Nutzpflanzen Griechenlands, p. 57.Note 138 · Munby, Catal., edit. 2, p. 9.Note 139 · Odyssey, bk. l, v. 84; Herodotos, l. 4, p. 177, trans. in Lenz, Bot. der Alt., p. 653.Note 140 · Theophrastus, Hist., l. 4, c. 4, edit. 1644. The edition of 1613 does not contain the words which refer to this detail.Note 141 · Schweinfurth and Ascherson, Beitr. zur Fl. Æthiop., p. 263.Note 142 · See the article on the carob tree.Note 143 · Desfontaines, Fl. Atlant., i. p. 200; Munby, Catal. Alger., edit. 2, p. 9; Ball, Spicilegium, Fl. Maroc., p. 301; Willkomm and Lange, Prodr.Note 144 · This name, which is little used, occurs in Bauhin, as Jujuba Indica.Note 145 · Sir J. Hooker, Fl. Brit. Ind., i. p. 632; Brandis, Forest Fl., i. 87; Bentham, Fl. Austral., i. p. 412; Boissier, Fl. Orient., ii. p. 13; Ol Note 146 · Received from Martius, No. 1070, from the Cabo frio.Note 147 · Bouton, in Hooker’s Journ. of Bot.; Baker, Fl. of Mauritius, p. 61; Brandis.Note 148 · Kurz, Forest Flora of Burmah, i. p. 266.Note 149 · Beddone, Forest Flora of India, i. pl. 149 (representing the wild fruit, which is smaller than that of the cultivated plant); Brandis.Note 150 · Rheede, iv. pl. 141.Note 151 · Piddington, Index.Note 152 · Rumphius, Amboyna, ii. pl. 36.Note 153 · Zizyphus abyssinicus, Hochst, seems to be a different species.Note 154 · Tussac, Flore des Antilles, iii. p. 55 (where there is an excellent figure, pl. 13). He says that it is an East Indian species, thus aggrava Note 155 · Géogr. Bot. Rais., p. 873 Note 156 · Piso and Marcgraf, Hist. rer. Natur. Brasil, 1648, p. 57.Note 157 · Vide Piso and Marcgraf; Aublet, Guyane, p. 392; Seemann, Bot. of the Herald, p. 106; Jacquin, Amér., p. 124; Macfadyen, Pl. Jamaic., p. 119;Note 158 · Ernst in Seemann, Journ. of Bot., 1867, p. 273.Note 159 · Rheede, Malabar, iii. pl. 54.Note 160 · Rumphius, Herb. Amboin., i. pp. 177, 178.Note 161 · Beddone, Flora Sylvatica, t. 163; Hooker, Fl. Brit. Ind., ii. p. 20.Note 162 · Loureiro, Fl. Cochin., p. 304.Note 163 · Brown, Congo, pp. 12, 49.Note 164 · Oliver, Fl. of Trop. Afr., i. p. 443.Note 165 · See plate 4510 of the Botanical Magazine.Note 166 · Roxburgh, Flora Indica, edit. 2, vol. ii. p. 435; Piddington, Index.Note 167 · Rumphius, Herb. Amboin., i. p. 95.Note 168 · Blanco, Fl. Filip., p. 181.Note 169 · Rumphius; Forskal, p. cvii.Note 170 · Thwaites, Enum. Plant. Ceyl., p. 75; Brandis, Forest Flora, p. 126; Hooker, Fl. Brit. Ind., ii. p. 13; Kurz, Forest Flora Brit. Burmah, i. p Note 171 · Oliver, Flora of Trop. Afr., i. p. 442; Baker, Fl. of Maur. and Seych., p. 63.Note 172 · Hughes, Barbados, p. 177.Note 173 · Macfadyen, Fl. of Jam., p. 221; Sir J. Hooker, Speech at the Royal Institute.Note 174 · Sagot, Jour. de la Soc. Centr. d’Agric. de France, 1872.Note 175 · Forster, De Plantis Esculentis Insularum Oceani Australis, p. 33; Seemann, Flora Vitiensis, p. 51; Nadaud, Enum. des Plantes de Taïti, p. 75 Note 176 · There is a good coloured illustration in Tussac’s Fl. des Antilles, iii. pl. 28.Note 177 · Boyer, Hortus Mauritianus, p. 81.Note 178 · H. C. Watson, Compendium Cybele Brit., i. p. 160; Fries, Summa Veg. Scand., p. 44.Note 179 · Lowe, Man. Fl. of Madeira, p. 246; Willkomm and Lange, Prodr. Fl. Hisp., iii. p. 224; Moris, Fl. Sardoa, ii. p. 17.Note 180 · Boissier, Fl. Orient.Note 181 · Ledebour, Fl. Ross., ii. p. 64.Note 182 · Gay; Hooker, Fl. Brit. Ind., ii. p. 344; Franchet and Savatier, Enum. Pl. Japon., i. p. 129.Note 183 · Perny, Propag. de la Foi, quoted in Decaisne’s Jardin Fruitier du Mus., p. 27. Gay does not give China.Note 184 · Babington, Journ. of Linnæan Society, ii. p. 303; J. Gay.Note 185 · Asa Gray, Botany of the Northern States, edit. 1868, p. 156.Note 186 · Sir W. Hooker, Fl. Bor. Amer., i. p. 184.Note 187 · A. Gray, Bot. Calif., i. p. 176.Note 188 · J. Gay, in Decaisne, Jardin Fruitier du Muséum, Fraisier, p. 30.Note 189 · Le Grand d’Aussy, Hist. de la Vie Privée des Français, i. pp. 233 and 3.Note 190 · Olivier de Serres, Théâtre d’Agric., p. 511; Gerard, from Phillips, Pomarium Britannicum, p. 334.Note 191 · Purdie, in Hooker’s London Journal of Botany, 1844, p. 515.Note 192 · Bojer, Hortus Mauritianus, p. 121.Note 193 · Bory Saint-Vincent, Comptes Rendus de l’Acad. des. Sc. Nat., 1836, sem. ii. p. 109.Note 194 · Asa Gray, Manual of Botany of the Northern States, edit. 1868, p. 155; Botany of California, i. p. 177.Note 195 · Phillips, Romar. Brit., p. 335.Note 196 · Cl. Gay, Hist. Chili, Botanica, ii. p. 305.Note 197 · Ledebour. Fl. Ross., ii. p. 6; Boissier, Fl. Orient., ii. p. 649.Note 198 · Ledebour, ibid.; Fries, Summa Scand., p. 46; Nyman, Conspec. Fl. Eur., p. 213; Boissier. ibid.; Willkomm and Lange, Prodr. Fl. Hisp., iii. p Note 199 · Munby, Catal. Alger., edit. 2, p. 8.Note 200 · As the cherries ripen after the season when birds migrate, they disperse the stones chiefly in the neighbourhood of the plantations.Note 201 · Sir J. Hooker, Fl. of Brit. India.Note 202 · Lowe, Manual of Madeira, p. 235.Note 203 · Darlington, Fl. Cestrica, edit. 3, p. 73.Note 204 · Ad. Pictet, Origines Indo-Europ., edit. 2, vol. i. p. 281.Note 205 · Heer, Pflanzen der Pfahlbauten, p. 24, figs. 17, 18, and p. 26.Note 206 · In Perrin, Études Préhist. sur la Savoie, p. 22.Note 207 · Atte Soc. Ital. Sc. Nat., vol. vi.Note 208 · For the numerous varieties which have common names in France, varying with the different provinces, see Duhamel, Traité des Arbres, edit. 2,Note 209 · Hohenacker, Plantæ Talysch., p. 128.Note 210 · Koch, Dendrologie, i. p. 110.Note 211 · Ledebour, Fl. Ross., ii. p. 6.Note 212 · Grisebach, Spicil. Fl. Rumel., p. 86.Note 213 · Boissier, Fl. Orient., ii. p. 649; Tchihatcheff, Asie Mineure, Bot., p. 198.Note 214 · Sir J. Hooker, Fl. of Brit. India, ii, p. 313.Note 215 · Steven, Verzeichniss Halbinselm, etc., p. 147.Note 216 · Rehmann, Verhandl. Nat. Ver. Brunn, x. 1871.Note 217 · Heldreich, Nutzpfl. Griech., p. 69; Pflanzen d’Attisch. Ebene., p. 477.Note 218 · Viviani, Fl. Dalmat., iii. p. 258.Note 219 · Bertoloni, Fl. Ital., v. p. 131.Note 220 · Lecoc and Lamotte, Catal. du Plat. Centr. de la France, p. 148.Note 221 · Theophrastes, Hist. Pl., lib. 3, c. 13; Pliny, lib. 15, c. 25, and others quoted in Lenz, Bot. der Alten Gr. and Röm., p. 710.Note 222 · Part of the description of Theophrastus shows a confusion with other trees. He says, for instance, that the nut is soft.Note 223 · Ad. Pictet quotes forms of the same name in Persian, Turkish, and Russian, and derives from the same source the French word guigne, now used Note 224 · Schouw, Die Erde, p. 44; Comes, Ill. delle Piante, etc., in 4to, p. 56.Note 225 · Sordelli, Piante della torbiera di Lagozza, p. 40.Note 226 · Caruel, Flora Toscana, p. 48.Note 227 · Hist., lib. 15, c. 13.Note 228 · Koch, Syn. Fl. Germ., edit. 2, p. 228; Cosson and Germain, Flore des Environs de Paris, i. p. 165.Note 229 · Hudson, Fl. Anglic., 1778, p. 212, unites them under the name Prunus communis.Note 230 · Ledebour, Fl. Ross., ii. p. 5; Boissier, Fl. Orient., ii. p. 652; K. Koch, Dendrologie, i. p. 94; Boissier and Bühse, Aufzähl Transcaucasien Note 231 · Dioscorides, p. 174.Note 232 · Bretschneider, On the Study, etc., p. 10.Note 233 · Fraas, Syn. Fl. Class., p. 69.Note 234 · Heldreich, Pflanzen Attischen Ebene.Note 235 · Steven, Verzeichniss Halbinseln, i. p. 172.Note 236 · Comes, Ill. Piante Pompeiane.Note 237 · Insititia = foreign. A curious name, since every plant is foreign to all countries but its own.Note 238 · Willkomm and Lange, Prodr. Fl. Hisp., iii. p. 244; Bertoloni, Fl. Ital., v. p. 135; Grisebach, Spicel. Fl. Rumel.,p. 85; Heldreich, Nutzpfl.Note 239 · Boissier, Fl. Orient., ii. p. 651; Ledebour, Fl. Ross., ii. p. 5; Hohenacker, Pl. Talysch, p. 128.Note 240 · Dioscorides, p. 173; Fraas, Fl. Class., p. 69.Note 241 · Heldreich, Nutzpflanzen Griechenlands, p. 68.Note 242 · Ibid.Note 243 · Heer, Pflanzen der Pfahlbauten, p. 27, fig. 16, c.Note 244 · Dioscorides, lib. 1, c. 165.Note 245 · Pliny, lib. 2, cap. 12.Note 246 · The Latin name has passed into modern Greek (prikokkia). The Spanish and French names, etc. (albaricoque, abricot), seem to be derived from Note 247 · Ledebour, Fl. Ross., ii. p. 3.Note 248 · Boissier, Fl. Orient., ii. p. 652.Note 249 · Tchihatcheff, Asie Mineure, Botanique, vol. i.Note 250 · K. Koch, Dendrologie, i. p. 87.Note 251 · Nouv. Ann. des Voyages, Feb., 1839, p. 176.Note 252 · E. de Salle, Voyage, i. p. 140.Note 253 · Spach, Hist. des Végét. Phanér., i. p. 389.Note 254 · Boissier and Buhse, Aufzählung, etc., in 4to, 1860.Note 255 · Reynier, Économie des Égyptiens, p. 371.Note 256 · Munby, Catal. Fl. d’Algér., edit. 2, p. 49.Note 257 · Schweinfurth and Ascherson, Beitrage z. Fl. Æthiop., in 4to., 1867, p. 259.Note 258 · Royle, Ill. of Himalaya, p. 205; Aitchison, Catal. of Punjab and Sindh, p. 56; Sir Joseph Hooker, Fl. of Brit. Ind., ii. p. 313; Brandis, Fo Note 259 · Westmael, in Bull. Soc. Bot. Belgiq., viii., p. 219.Note 260 · Roxburgh, Fl. Ind., edit. 2, v. ii. p. 501.Note 261 · Bretschneider, On the Study and Value, etc., pp. 10, 49.Note 262 · Decaisne, Jardin Fruitier du Muséum, vol. viii., art. Abricotier.Note 263 · Dr. Bretschneider confirms this in a recent work, Notes on Botanical Questions, p. 3.Note 264 · Prunus armeniaca of Thunberg is P. mume of Siebold and Zuccharini. The apricot is not mentioned in the Enumeratio, etc., of Franchet and Sav Note 265 · Capus (Ann. Sc. Nat., sixth series, vol. xv. p. 206) found it wild in Turkestan at the height of four thousand to seven thousand feet, which Note 266 · Piddington, Index; Roxburgh, Fl. Ind.; Forskal, Fl. Ægyp.; Delile Ill. Egypt.Note 267 · Bretschneider, On the Study and Value, etc.Note 268 · Bretschneider, Early European Researches, p. 149.Note 269 · Bretschneider, Study and Value, etc., p. 10; and Early Europ. Resear., p. 149.Note 270 · Brandis, Forest Flora; Sir J. Hooker, Fl. of Brit. Ind., iii. p. 313.Note 271 · Roxburgh, Fl. Ind., edit. 2, vol. ii. p. 500; Royle, Ill. Himal., p. 204.Note 272 · Boissier, Fl. Orien., iii. p. 641.Note 273 · K. Koch, Dendrologie, i. p. 80; Tchihatcheff, Asie Mineure Botanique, i. p. 108.Note 274 · Ann. des Sc. Nat., 3rd series, vol. xix. p. 108.Note 275 · Gussone, Synopsis Floræ Siculæ, i. p. 552; Heldreich, Nutzpflanzen Griechenlands, p. 67.Note 276 · Hiller, Hierophyton, i. p. 215; Rosenmüller, Handb. Bibl. Alterth., iv. p. 263.Note 277 · Theophrastus, Hist., lib. 1, c. 11, 18, etc.; Dioscorides, lib. 1, c. 176.Note 278 · Schouw, Die Erde, etc.; Comes, Ill. Piante nei dipinti Pomp., p. 13.Note 279 · Pliny, Hist., lib. 16, c. 22.Note 280 · Moris, Flora Sardoa, ii. p. 5; Willkomm and Lange, Prodr. Fl. Hisp., ii. p. 243.Note 281 · Dictionnaire Français Berbère, 1844.Note 282 · Alph. de Candolle, Géogr. Bot. Rais., p. 881.Note 283 · Theophrastus, Hist., iv. c. 4; Dioscorides, lib. 1, c. 164; Pliny, Geneva edit., bk. 15, c. 13.Note 284 · Royle, Ill. Him., p. 204.Note 285 · Roxburgh, Fl. Ind., 2nd. edit., ii. p. 500; Piddington, Index; Royle, ibid.Note 286 · Sir Joseph Hooker, Journ. of Bot., 1850, p. 54.Note 287 · Rose, the head of the French trade at Canton, collected these from Chinese manuscripts, and Noisette (Jard. Fruit., i. p. 76) has transcribe Note 288 · Lindley, Trans. Hort. Soc., v. p. 121.Note 289 · Trans. Hort. Soc. Lond., iv. p. 512, tab. 19.Note 290 · Roxburgh, Fl. Ind.