whose soul I have striven to make the child of mine, he will bear to her, to whose sacred ideal all was offered, the love and labor of my life, and she will see in him the result of all I have striven to be and do! I shall live again in his memories, his affections, in the works which, as an artist, he will produce-something of my existence lingering in him to the latest day of his life! He will complete the work I leave unfinished-the dream of so many years-my Prometheus! And yet," he added, a brighter and more blessed thought dawning in upon his soul, "perhaps I should not hope for this! To his more sunny and harmonious days may a holier and happier type be vouchsafed! For myself I am content! My life and love have not been in vain!" George Gilbert spoke no more. A placid smile lingered around his lips as he lay in death, and no trace was there of all that bitter pain which had given birth to his Prometheus. Through all Augusta's sorrow and regret as she gazed upon the dead man, there was a gleam of radiant happiness, for her arm was around her son. But for Elizabeth, standing there in tearless, desolate despair,-what solace is prepared for suffering like hers?

LX.-FRUITS IN THEIR SEASON.

V. THE ORANGE FAMILY.

S.

SUMMER'S light fruits have long since fled, and the more substantial stores of autumn, if lingering still, have yet lost much of their freshness and their flavor. Wherewith, then, shall we temper the dryness of our dessert? where seek some natural nectar, pure and cool, which may allay the ferment of young blood, heated by winter's festivities, and moisten the parched lip of the fever-stricken sufferer, longing above all for the refreshment only to be found in the dewy juice of newly-gathered fruits? A welcome answer is wafted on Atlantic breezes by a myriad white-winged messengers of commerce; and, plentiful as the most abundant of our homegrown produce, cheap almost as the cheapest berry of English birth, the healthful and delicious orange is poured upon our shores— a luxury grateful to the highest, and attainable by the lowest in the land. With what enthusiasm would the ancient Greek have hailed such a crowning gift of Pomona, what charming myths would have been invented to account for its origin, what lore of legends would have gathered round it as ages rolled by; for if the dry, coarse-husked walnut was deemed golden and God-like, and could exercise so much influence on their vivid imaginations, (as we have seen in Dr. Sickler's Hesperidean hypothesis, given in the article on Nuts,) what poetic raptures would surely have been

evoked, had they been blest with possession of the far more really auriferous orange-so brilliantly tinted a casket concealing such exquisite contents! But the Greek, alas! knew it not, nor yet the Roman, and it is sought in vain in Pliny's ample page or in the records of Apician banquets. It is true that a contrary opinion long prevailed; for when the Crusaders invaded Syria they found this fruit so abundant there that they believed it must be indigenous, and, dazzled by its bright hue, concluded at once that it must be the famous "golden apple" of Greek fable and of Hebrew Scripture; imposed a name upon it, accordingly; and then, with supreme disregard to logical consistency, argued from this very name to prove its identity. It was not until the year 1811 that its history was first carefully traced, when Galessio, in his "Traité du Citrus," published at Paris, a work of great learning and research, demonstrated that the Arabian Avicenna, who died in 1036, was the first writer who distinctly mentions the orange. Indisputably a native of India, yet unnoticed by Nearchus among the productions of that part of the country which was conquered by Alexander the Great, Galessio believes that the Arabs found it when they penetrated farther into the interior than the Son of Ammon had reached, and in the tenth century enriched the gardens of Oman with this new luxury. In 1002 Leon d'Ostie writes, that a Prince of Salerno sent a present of "poma citrina," interpreted to be a fruit like the citron rather than the citron itself, to the Norman princes who had delivered them from the Saracens. Avicenna, however, speaks more plainly, describing unmistakably the oil of oranges and of orangeseeds, as preparations used medicinally. Jacques Vitry, an historian of the thirteenth century, who accompanied the Crusaders in Palestine, after describing the lemon and citron found there, says, that in the same country are seen another species of citron apples, of which the cold part (or pulp, in contradistinction to the "hot" or acrid rind) is the least considerable, being of an acid and disagreeable taste. That it was, perhaps, an unripe fruit which was submitted to the palate of Maître Jacques, may account for his pronouncing such a verdict concerning it. These apples, he continues, are by the natives called "oranges." Nicholas Specialis, again, who, in the fourteenth century, wrote a history of Sicily, in recounting the devastations of the Duke of Calabria in the environs of Palermo, remarks, that he did not even spare the trees of acid apples, called by the people "arangi," which from ancient times had embellished the gardens of the royal palace. The bitter variety, however, now called by us Seville oranges, were at first the widest spread and most known in Europe; for from the tenth to the fifteenth century no passage in history refers to the sweet orange, all writers mentioning the fruit as one more pleasant to the sight than to the taste; and Galessio believes that the two kinds, originally distinct, travelled by different routes, and that they were brought by the Arabs through Egypt and the north of Africa to

Spain, while they transported the sweet sort through Persia into Syria, and thence to Italy and the south of France. Rhind, however, while accepting his statement as to the course of their journeyings, deduces from it that they were probably derived from one stock, and considers Galessio's theory of their transit to be borne out by the fact of the character of the respective fruits, coinciding with the probable influence of the ways in which they wandered; and that the one which had been transplanted from one genial climate to another, as in the case of Persia, Syria, and Italy, would be likely to remain sweet; while that which had been borne from the head of the Persian Gulf along the desert, to reach Spain, might well have become embittered by such a progress; for, according to him, "there is no absolute reason for supposing that the sweet and bitter orange were originally different; and even now they are not so different as two mushrooms of the very same variety, the one produced upon a dry and airy down, and the other upon a marsh.” The fruit seems, indeed, to be very susceptible to the influences of soil and climate, its flavor depending greatly upon pure air, and a sufficiency of moisture; a very high temperature increasing its size at the expense of its delicacy. Thus, St. Michael's, fanned by cool Atlantic breezes, produces a small pale, thin-skinned fruit, with deliciously sweet pulp; while Malta, an island also, yet dry and sultry from its proximity to the African coast, affords a large, thick-rinded orange, with red pulp, tasting slightly bitter. It is a curious circumstance, too, that beneath the artificial earth, (brought originally from Sicily,) which forms the soil of Malta, there gathers continually a kind of crust, either the decomposition of the rocky substratum, or the accumulation of saline particles brought by the pestilent sirocco; and if the earth be not periodically trenched, and this crust removed, the trees cease to bear, or their fruit becomes bitter and unwholesome. The Chinese claim the orange as a native fruit, and though the fact of there being no reference to it in the travels of the accurate and observant Marco Polo has led some to doubt this claim, yet it is more likely that he may have overlooked or forgotten it, than that it should have spread so widely there, and no record remain of its introduction had it been really transplanted thither. So thoroughly, too, was it formerly identified with that country, that the sweet fruit was once universally known in Europe as the "China orange," and it still bears that name in America, and even in India.

To return, however, to the history of its progress in this quarter of the globe, it was asserted by Valmont de Bomare, a Portuguese, that the first sweet orange brought to Europe was one till lately still preserved, and in the possession of the Count St. Laurent at Lisbon; and some other writers not only accepted this as a fact, but even particularized that it was brought by Jean de Castro, who voyaged in 1520; and it was further said to have been the only survivor of a number sent as a present from Asia to Conde Mellor, prime

minister of the king of Portugal.

Gallo, however, who published a work on Agriculture in 1569, speaking of the sweet oranges in the neighborhood of Salo on Lake Garda, says that they had been cultivated there from time immemorial; and even that most decisive personage, from whose final dictum there is no appeal-the "oldest inhabitant"-bringing the weight of nonagenarian memory to bear upon the question, could not remember a time when the trees had not been there, which shows that the Lisbon tree could not have been the first or only one brought to Europe at the time it dates from. To the Italians, and to the Genoese in particular, Galessio gives the credit of having been the earliest importers of these trees from the East; before long they began to cultivate them, and in the territory of St. Remo their number soon became so considerable, that in 1525 the municipal Council of that city appointed a magistrate specially to superintend this branch of commerce, and laid down rules for its regulation, by which it is found that the annual exportation thence amounted to several millions of fruit, and that nearly all France, Germany, and several other countries of Europe, were supplied from there. It is at Genoa, in the present day, that these plants meet with the most regular and garden-like culture, so that the orange orchards in that neighborhood may be said to supply all Europe with trees. Less attention, however, is devoted to them there than in France, but this is more than compensated for by the special suitability of soil and climate; for though treated more scientifically in Paris than at Genoa, or, indeed, anywhere else, yet natural disadvantages which cannot be overcome prevent their attaining equal perfection.

66

The date of the introduction of the orange-tree into our own country is supposed to have been about 1596, Aubrey, in his History of Surrey," mentioning the orangery of Beddington, "where are several orange-trees planted in the open ground, where they have throve to admiration for above a whole century, but are preserved during the winter under a moveable covert. They were brought from Italy by Sir Francis Carew, knight, and it was the first attempt of the kind that we hear of." The "Biographia Britannica," however, connects the origin of these trees with a more illustrious name, asserting that "from a tradition preserved in the family, they were raised by Sir Francis Carew, from the seeds of the first oranges which were imported into England by Sir Walter Raleigh, who had married his niece, the daughter of Sir Nicholas Throgmorton." It has been stated, that in 1690 most of these trees were thirteen feet high, and that at least ten thousand oranges were gathered from them that year; but after flourishing for about a century and a half, they were all killed by the great frost in 1739-40. Though generally looked on as plants only fit for the conservatory, they have for above a hundred years past been grown in gardens in Devonshire, trained like peach-trees against walls, and sheltered only with straw mats in winter, yet producing fruit as large and

fine as any from Portugal; and Loudon asserts very confidently that in other localities, "with a little care and without the expense of glass they could be grown against hollow walls, heated by flues, and protected by straw mats." The largest trees in Britain are those of Smorgony in Glamorganshire, said to have been procured from a wreck on the neighboring coast, in the time of Henry VII. They are planted on the floor of an immense conservatory, and bear abundantly. Fortunately, though, for "the million," orange lovers every one of them, we are not left to depend upon the efforts of scientific gardeners in an unsuitable climate for our supply of this universal favorite, but can obtain a sufficient response to our largest demands by means of importation. The best oranges are brought from the Azores, where they were originally introduced by the Portuguese, but Spain, Portugal, and other countries contribute 'their share to swell the mighty tide which pours into Britain. The total quantity cannot be ascertained with perfect exactitude, as oranges and lemons are reckoned together in the revenue returns, but in 1857 it was considered that not less than 692,842 bushels, paying a duty of eightpence per bushel, were annually imported; and Carpenter reckons that we receive numerically about 272,000,000 a year, giving an average of nearly a dozen to each individual of the population.

The various names applied to the orange-the Citrus aurantium or Hesperide of Linnæan botany-have given rise to much discussion. Citrum was a name given by the Romans to a kind of gourd, still called by the French citrouille, and the words citrinus and citrina, as epithets, were used for many fruits after they had been adopted to express the pale yellow tint proper to the citron, a fruit which was known in classic days, and was introduced into Italy ten centuries before the orange, to which it bears a certain family resemblance, though not a very close one. Aurantium seems to be formed from aureum, alluding to the golden color of the fruit; malum aureum was looked on as a synonym of the malum Hesperidum of the ancients; and the transition from aurantium to orange appears plausible enough.* It is rather fallacious, however, to seek in classic language the derivation of the names of objects unknown to those who spoke it. We should rather seek light in the East, and there we find that lemon and orange trees are known in India by the names of lemoen and naregan, while Hindostanee dictionaries give the word narendj as still being the Hindoo name for our golden-robed friends. From narendy, then, must have come the Latin airangi, afterwards modified into aurantium, whence the English and French derived their orange, the Spaniards their naranxa, and the Italians their

* The district in France which gave its name to the Netherlandish dynasty, was known to the Romans under the name of Arausio, afterwards changed to Orange; but why it received the former name, or how this came to be altered in the same way as was the name of the fruit, the writer of this article, after much research, has been unable to ascertain.