ORANGE-TREE, in Botany. See CITRUS, BOTANY INDEX.—Orange flowers are justly esteemed one of the finest perfumes; and though little used in medicine, yet the water distilled from them is accounted stomachic, cordial, and carminative. The fruit is cooling, and good in feverish disorders, and particularly in diarrhoeas. Orange-peel is an agreeable aromatic, proper to repair and strengthen the stomach, and gives a very grateful flavour to any infusions or tinctures into whose compositions it enters. It is particularly useful in preparations of the bark: gives an agreeable warmth to the infusion; and, according to Dr Percival, considerably increases its virtue.
In the Philosophical Transactions, No 114, there is a very remarkable account of a tree standing in a grove near Florence, having an orange stock, which had been so grafted upon, that it became in its branches, leaves, flowers, and fruit, three-formed: some emulating the orange, some the lemon or citron, and some partaking of both forms in one; and what was very remarkable was, that these mixed fruits never produced any perfect seeds: sometimes there were no seeds at all in them, and sometimes only a few empty ones.