103 
cannot be made to grow successfully; among them, I am sorry to 
say, the strawberry. The little wild clover here is a dwarf species 
but very fragrant. The apples and pears are wretched. The 
potatoes are good, and are said to have descended from some which 
a missionary planted in the mountains some thirty years ago—in 
times of persecution, too, which drove him out of the country, but 
left thus one fruit of his labors. Green peas, of several varieties, 
are good and abundant, but the native lentiles are much more so. 
The “ Oddis,” a lenticular shaped fruit of this kind, about one third 
the size of a moderately large pea, is one of the most common. . 
This assumes a reddish color when boiled, and is commonly supposed 
to be the red pottage for which Esau sold his birthright. It is not 
very much to my taste, but is very much liked by the natives, even 
those born of American parents. The immense prickly pear, used 
everywhere for fences, impenetrable by anything from chickens to 
cavalry, produces fruit abundantly, which is esteemed excellent and 
cooling insummer. The plant is the same with that seen so abundant- 
ly in Southern Italy, Cyprus, etc., and I have occasionally eaten its 
fruit in New York. Iam here reminded that the general aspect of 
the vegetation here (as indeed might be expected) strongly resem- 
bles that of Southern Italy. Prominent, of course, are the Fig, 
Olive, Kharfib (“husks that the swine did eat”) and the prickly 
pear—called Indian Fig in Italy—with many similar cultivated 
herbaceous things. The most striking difference is the occurrence 
here of the date palm, which I first met on the island of Syra, about 
the public square of the town. The edible nuts of one species of 
pine, too, are an extensive article of food here, as well as about 
Naples. Here it is called Snoder, and is much used in all sorts of 
dishes. 
The Ornithogalum umbellatum is now in flower everywhere ; but, 
whether owing to the scarcity of rain or not, it appears to me to be in 
arather starved condition. A Scilla, which I am told by. the 
botanists here is the Scilla Fraseri, though it appears to me quite 
different from my recollection of it as I saw it in America, is 
strikingly abundant. I found it everywhere in Syra, about Smyrna, 
and Ephesus, and almost covering the ground in wide spaces over 
the site of ancient Citium and about the Larnaca salines in Cyprus. 
The Cypriotes told me that the bulb was poisonous, producing 
headache, delirum and death. As you are doubtless aware, tle 
Eastern end of the Mediterranean is the country of bulbs, both for 
species and quantity. 
Heliotropium Europeum ; the scentless heliotrope, is very com- 
_mon here; and indeed everywhere that I have been after reaching 
Southern Italy. But about Smyrna and Ephesus I found the 
scented heliotrope quite frequently. 
Beirut, April 8th, 1876. es as 
§ 108. Phaseolus multiflorus.—The point made by the writer, 
in replying, in your last number but one, to a criticism of Dr. 
Trumbull’s, was that Phaseolus multiflorus was founded on Cor- 
nuti’s plant; which last then, the inference is obvious, should be 
what was originally meant by P. multiflorus. 
