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 Hooker[907] 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.
Royle[909] 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, Loureiro[910] 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.