[SPECIMEN PAGE. ] 
CISTINEA 80 
clumps on the garden beds. On. the rocks of Greece, as well as those of 
Palestine, the Cistus shrubs are very abundant, and all the genera abound 
most on dry and elevated spots, some of them being natives of almost all the 
countries of the world. The balsam called Ladanum, which is so much 
used as a perfume in Greece and in Oriental countries, and which is prized for 
its tonic and stomachic properties, is produced by the Cistus creticus. Southey 
has described the fragrance of the Cistus plants : 
‘The forest or the lonely heath wide spread, 
Where Cistus shrubs sole seen, exhaled at noon 
Their fine balsamic odour all around, 
Strew’d with their blossoms, frail as beautiful, 
The thirsty soil at eve ; and when the sun 
Relumed the gladden‘d earth, opening anew 
Their stores exuberant, prodigal! as frail, 
Whiten’d again the wilderness.” 
1. Rock-RosE (Helidnthemum).—Sepals 5, the two outer either smaller or 
wanting; petals 5; stamens numerous; capsule 3-valved. Named from the 
Greek héelios, the sun, and anthos, a flower, because the flowers expand in 
the sunshine. 
1. RocK-RoseE (Helidnthemum). 
1. Common Rock-rose (H. vulgdre).—Stem shrubby, prostrate ; leaves 
with fringed stipules, opposite, oblong, green above, hoary beneath ; calyx of 
five leaves, the two outer very small and fringed; seeds black. Plant 
perennial. Anyone used to roam over the chalky or gravelly soils of this 
country must have often seen, early in spring and late in autumn, the pros- 
trate branches of this Rock-rose, covered with their leaves. In spring these 
are of a tender verdant tint; but late in the year they are rigid, of a dark 
myrtle-colour, and shine with the deepest green hue on the reddened leaf- 
stems. When the sunshine of July pours down on the grassy slopes, and 
tinges their sides with its gleams, the clumps of brilliant yellow flowers are 
bright, as if the sun had turned them into gold. They are truly, as the 
ancients called them, Beauties of the Sun, or, as some country people term 
them, Sun-Roses; never opening save when skies are bright, and never 
_ lingering on till the late autumnal season. Their petals are crumpled and 
fragile, and the little unblown buds are very pretty, standing by thousands 
as they do among the grass on a cloudy day, waiting for the morrow’s sun. 
_ The stamens are very sensitive, and if only touched by the wing of an insect 
or the point of a needle, they all lie down on the petals. It is long before 
they resume their erect position, and in some cases they appear not to do 
3o at all. The bees seem very fond of these flowers, flying from one clump 
to another, with their deep joyous humming, passing by their favourite wild 
thyme, to rob the Cistus flower, which first invited them ; for these sagacious 
insects keep throughout the morning to the same kind of blossom as that 
from which they first gathered the honey, and never mingle the sweets of 
the thyme and the Cistus. 
Many writers on the flowers of Scripture consider that a variety of this 
Rock-rose is the plant alluded to in the Canticles, as the Rose of Sharon. It 
does not appear that the Hebrew word, Chabazzeleth, which our translators 
have rendered by “rose,” is ever applied to that flower ; and as the plains of 
