Gibbon supplement B

Here he is almost pushing his luck in stylistic terms, but the result is a thing of beauty:

“It would be almost impossible to enumerate all the articles, either of the animal or the vegetable reign, which were successively imported into Europe from Asia and Egypt; but it will not be unworthy of the dignity, and much less of the utility, of an historical work, slightly to touch on a few of the principal heads. Almost all the flowers, the herbs, and the fruits that grow in our European gardens are of foreign extraction, which, in many cases, is betrayed even by their names: the apple was a native of Italy, and when the Romans had tasted the richer flavour of the apricot, the peach, the pomegranate, the citron, and the orange, they contented themselves with applying to all the new fruits the common denomination of apple, discriminating them from each other by the additional epithet of their country.”

(Bonus points for Gibbon if “lemon” was already the usual English word by then and “citron” was chosen purposely as an allusive alternative. I don’t know the answer to that.)

My favorite feature of at least some Egyptian supermarkets is their tendency to group apples not by type, but by nationality. At the Metro Market a few blocks from here, I regularly choose between “American,” “Syrian,” “Iranian,” and “Chinese” apples. The Syrian ones are generally my favorite.