Origin of Cultivated Plants

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.