I doubt whether its area includes China or the Malay Archipelago. Loureiro mentions _Citrus medica_ in Cochin-China only as a cultivated plant, and Bretschneider tells us that the lemon has Chinese names which do not exist in the ancient writings, and for which the written characters are complicated, indications of a foreign species. It may, he says, have been introduced. In Japan the species is only a cultivated one.[890] Lastly, several of Rumphius’ illustrations show varieties cultivated in the Sunda Islands, but none of these are considered by the author as really wild and indigenous to the country. To indicate the locality, he sometimes used the expression “_in hortis sylvestribus_,” which might be translated shrubberies. Speaking of his _Lemon sussu_ (vol. ii. pl. 25), which is a _Citrus medica_ with ellipsoidal acid fruit, he says it has been introduced into Amboyna, but that it is commoner in Java, “usually in forests.” This may be the result of an accidental naturalization from cultivation. Miquel, in his modern flora of the Dutch Indies,[891] does not hesitate to say that _Citrus medica_ and _C. Limonum_ are only cultivated in the archipelago. The cultivation of more or less acid varieties spread into Western Asia at an early date, at least into Mesopotamia and Media. This can hardly be doubted, for two varieties had Sanskrit names; and, moreover, the Greeks knew the fruit through the Medes, whence the name _Citrus medica_. Theophrastus[892] was the first to speak of it under the name of apple of Media and of Persia, in a phrase often repeated and commented on in the last two centuries.[893] It evidently applies to _Citrus medica_; but while he explains how the seed is first sown in vases, to be afterwards transplanted, the author does not say whether this was the Greek custom, or whether he was describing the practice of the Medes. Probably the citron was not then cultivated in Greece, for the Romans did not grow it in their gardens at the beginning of the Christian era. Dioscorides,[894] born in Cilicia, and who wrote in the first century, speaks of it in almost the same terms as Theophrastus. It is supposed that the species was, after many attempts,[895] cultivated in Italy in the third or fourth century. Palladius, in the fifth century, speaks of it as well established. The ignorance of the Romans of the classic period touching foreign plants has caused them to confound, under the name of _lignum citreum_, the wood of _Citrus_, with that of _Cedrus_, of which fine tables were made, and which was a cedar, or a _Thuya_, of the totally different family of Coniferæ.