ORRUS, in botany, a name by which many of the ancients called the cultivated pine-tree, from its being remarkably full of juice.
The first person who has given us the name is Theophrastus; but he is followed in it not only by the other Greeks, but also by the Latins, who have called the same tree for the same reason sapinus, a contraction or abbreviation of the word sapinus, the juicy pine. Pliny tells us, that this last was the name of the manured pitch tree; but in this he errs: for Vitruvius, and others, tell us, that the pine-nuts, nucis pinee, which were eaten and used in medicine, were the fruit of the sapinus, or sapinus; and it is evident, that these must be the produce of a pine-tree, not of a pitch-tree, or any thing of the first kind.