north and then south, making a loop of fully 90 m., of which the two ends are but 38 m. apart. Crossing the narrow coast plain the river, with a south-westerly sweep, enters the ocean by a single mouth, studded with small islands, in 28° 37′ S., 16° 30′ E. A large sand bar obstructs the entrance to the river, which is not quite 1 m. wide. The river when in flood, at which time it has a depth of 40 ft., scours a channel through the bar, but the Orange is at all times inaccessible to sea-going vessels. Above the bar it is navigable by small vessels for 30 or 40 m. In the neighbourhood of the Vaal confluence, where the river passes through alluvial land, and at some other places, the waters of the Orange are used, and are capable of being much more largely used, for irrigation purposes.
The Hottentots call the Orange the Garib (great water), corrupted by the Dutch into Gariep. The early Dutch settlers called it simply Groote-Rivier. It was first visited by Europeans about the beginning of the 18th century. In 1685 Simon van der Stell, then governor of the Cape, led an expedition into Little Namaqualand and discovered the Koper Berg. In 1704 and 1705 other expeditions to Namaqualand were made. Attempts to mine the copper followed, and the prospectors and hunters who penetrated northward sent to the Cape reports of the existence of a great river whose waters always flowed. The first scientific expedition to reach the Orange was that under Captain Henry Hop sent by Governor Tulbagh in 1761, partly to investigate the reports concerning a semi-civilized yellow race living north of the great river. Hop crossed the Orange in September 1761, but shortly afterwards returned. Andrew Sparrman, the Swedish naturalist, when exploring in the Sneeuwberg in 1776, learned from the Hottentots that eight or ten days’ journey north there was a large perennial stream, which he rightly concluded was the groote-rivier of Hop. The next year Captain (afterwards Colonel) R. J. Gordon, a Dutch officer of Scottish extraction, who commanded the garrison at Cape Town, reached the river in its middle course at the spot indicated by Sparrman and named it the Orange in honour of the prince of Orange. In 1778 Lieut. W. Paterson, an English traveller, reached the river in its lower course, and in 1779 Paterson and Gordon journeyed along the west coast of the colony and explored the mouth of the river. F. Le Vaillant also visited the Orange near its mouth in 1784. Mission stations north of the Orange were established a few years later, and in 1813 the Rev. John Campbell, after visiting Griqualand West for the London Missionary Society, traced the Harts river, and from its junction with the Vaal followed the latter stream to its confluence with the Orange, journeying thence by the banks of the Orange as far as Pella, in Little Namaqualand, discovering the great falls. These falls were in 1885 visited and described by G. A. Farini, from whom they received the name of the Hundred Falls. The source of the Orange was first reached by the French Protestant missionaries T. Arbousset and F. Daumas in 1836.
The story of Hop’s expedition is told in the Nouvelle description du Cap de Bonne Espérance (Amsterdam, 1778). Lieut. Paterson gave his experiences in A Narrative of Four Journeys into the Country of the Hottentots and Caffraria in the Years 1777–1778–1779 (London, 1789). See also Campbell’s Travels in South Africa (London, 1815), Arbousset and Daumas’ Relation d’un voyage d’exploration au nord-est de la colonie du Cap de Bonne Espérance en 1836 (Paris, 1842), and Farini’s Through the Kalahari Desert (London, 1886).
ORANGE (Citrus Aurantium). The plant that produces the familiar fruit of commerce is closely allied to the citron, lemon and lime, all the cultivated forms of the genus Citrus being so nearly related that their specific demarcation must be regarded as somewhat doubtful and indefinite. The numerous kinds of orange chiefly differing in the external shape, size and flavour of the fruit may all probably be traced to two well-marked varieties or sub-species—the sweet or China orange, var. sinensis, and the bitter orange or bigarade, var. amara.
The Bitter Seville or Bigarade Orange, C. Aurantium, var. amara (C. vulgaris of Risso), is a rather small tree, rarely exceeding 30 ft. in height. The green shoots bear sharp axillary spines, and alternate evergreen oblong leaves, pointed at the extremity, and with the margins entire or very slightly serrated; they are of a bright glossy green, tint, the stalks distinctly winged and, as in the other species, articulated with the leaf. The fragrant white or pale pinkish flowers appear in the summer months, and the fruit, usually round or spheroidal, does not perfectly ripen until the following spring, so that flowers and both green and mature fruit are often found on the plant at the same time. The bitter aromatic rind of the bigarade is rough, and dotted closely over with concave oil-cells; the pulp is acid and more or less bitter in flavour.
The Sweet or China Orange, including the Malta or Portugal orange, has the petioles less distinctly winged, and the leaves more ovate in shape, but chiefly differs in the fruit, the pulp of which is agreeably acidulous and sweet, the rind comparatively smooth, and the oil-cells convex. The ordinary round shape of the sweet orange fruit is varied greatly in certain varieties, in some being greatly elongated, in others much flattened; while several kinds have a conical protuberance at the apex, others are deeply ribbed or furrowed, and a few are distinctly “horned” or lobed, by the partial separation of the carpels. The two subspecies of orange are said to reproduce themselves infallibly by seed; and, where hybridizing is prevented, the seedlings of the sweet and bitter orange appear to retain respectively the more distinctive features of the parent plant.
Orange (Citrus Aurantium, var. amara), from nature, about
one-third natural size. 𝑎, diagram of flower.
Though now cultivated widely in most of the warmer parts of the world, and apparently in many completely naturalized, the diffusion of the orange has taken place in comparatively recent historical periods. To ancient Mediterranean agriculture it was unknown; and, though the later Greeks and Romans were familiar with the citron as an exotic fruit, their “median apple” appears to have been the only form of the citrine genus with which they were acquainted. The careful researches of Gallesio have proved that India was the country from which the orange spread to western Asia and eventually to Europe. Oranges are at present found wild in the jungles along the lower mountain slopes of Sylhet, Kumaon, Sikkim and other parts of northern India, and, according to Royle, even in the Nīlgiri Hills; the plants are generally thorny, and present the other characters of the bitter variety, but occasionally wild oranges occur with sweet fruit; it is, however, doubtful whether either sub-species is really indigenous to Hindustan, and De Candolle is probably correct in regarding the Burmese peninsula and southern China as the original home of the orange. Cultivated from a remote period in Hindustan, it was carried to south-western Asia by the Arabs, probably before the 9th century, towards the close of which the bitter orange seems to have been well known to that people; though, according to Masʽūdī, it was not cultivated in Arabia itself until the beginning of the 10th century, when it was first planted in ʽOmān, and afterwards carried to Mesopotamia and Syria. It spread ultimately, through the agency of the same race, to Africa and Spain, and perhaps to Sicily, following
