AUGUST 5.
THE NAVEL ORANGE 250 YEARS AGO.
Most Americans know an orange by sight, and we of California count it a blood relation. We do grow the best orange in the world, and ship thousands of loads of it in a year; and we have a modest notion that we invented it, and that we "know oranges." But the handsomest, the fullest and the most erudite treatise on oranges ever printed does not derive from California, nor yet from the Only Smart Nation.... On the contrary, it was printed in Rome in the year 1646.... More accurate drawings of these fruits have never been printed; and the illustrations cover not only the varieties and even the "freaks" of the Golden Apple, but the methods of planting, budding, wall-training and housing it. Perhaps the point likeliest to jar our complacent ignorance is the fact that this venerable work describes and pictures seedless oranges, and even the peculiar "sport," now an established variety, which we know as the "Navel". Two hundred and fifty seven years ago it was called the "Female, or Foetus-bearing orange"; but no one today can draw a better picture, nor a more unmistakable, of a navel orange.
CHARLES F. LUMMIS,
in Out West.
AUGUST 6.
THE SIERRA NEVADAS.
Serene and satisfied! Supreme! As lone
As God, they loom like God's archangels churl'd;