Mango
2 of the 6 encyclopedias on this shelf carry an entry for Mango. Both are reproduced below, so you can see where they agree and where they differ.
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
a tropical fruit eaten from the hand or sliced and served like tomatoes. The fruit is four to five inches long. It has a smooth, soft, yellow or red skin, and a single seed almost as long as the fruit. The mango is a favorite fruit at Bombay. Beginners say a common mango "tastes like a ball of cotton soaked in turpentine and molasses." Partisans of the fruit claim that the "custard-like pulp combines the fragrance of the apricot and the pineapple." Though the mango tree is an Asiatic species, it is cultivated extensively in the West Indies . It was a promising fruit tree in Florida prior to the hard winter of 1885-6. Botanically, the mango tree is related to the sumac. The fruit is a pulpy, juicy drupe. The bark and leaves are rich in tannin.
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
an umbrageous tree, wild on the western Ghats, in the Chutia Nagpore Hills and the Naga Hills, and cultivated all over India. The fruit is considered one of the very best in India; it is laxative. The bark of the root and, to a certain extent, of the stem, is used in diarrhea, etc. The young leaves are good for pec pectoral cal complaints, the old ones for cleaning the teeth. The seeds are anthelmintic and the resin of the bark antisyphilitic. The seeds contain gallic acid. The bark and the leaves yield an inferior yellow dye. The dry unripe fruit is used as a mordant, especially in dyeing with safflower. The leaves and the bark are used in parts of India in tanning.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
Aiton's 1910 warning that a common mango "tastes like a ball of cotton soaked in turpentine and molasses" describes the stringy seedling fruit of the day; the modern supermarket mango descends from grafted, named cultivars, several of them selected in the very Florida groves the entry had written off after the freeze of 1885-6, including Haden and its descendants Tommy Atkins, Kent and Keitt. Mango is now among the most widely grown fruits on earth, with world output in the tens of millions of tonnes and India alone supplying something close to half of it; hot-water and irradiation quarantine treatments against fruit fly opened North American and European markets to imported fruit that Collier's readers could only have eaten in the tropics. The botany holds up: the tree is still placed in the sumac family, Anacardiaceae, alongside cashew and poison ivy, which is why its sap and skin can raise a rash in sensitive people. Collier's 1921 list of medicinal uses -- bark for diarrhoea, seeds as a vermifuge, resin as an antisyphilitic -- records traditional Indian practice rather than treatments any physician would prescribe today.
Written for this edition, 2026.