BLACK MUSTARD 



Open, and trails of seed-pods follow the flowers and 

 hug the stem. 



The small, dark brown seed is a valuable commercial 

 product. It furnishes much of the mustard of the 

 table, as well as one of the best-known household appli- 

 cations for common ills. The use of mustard foot- 

 baths and mustard plasters is only too well known. 

 The oil of mustard used in liniments is intensely 

 pungent. When used as fodder the plant is harvested 

 before the seeds mature. 



"The kingdom of heaven is like unto a grain of mustard seed, 

 which a man took and sowed in his field; which indeed is less than 

 all seeds; but when it is grown is the greatest among herbs and 

 becometh a tree, so that the birds of the air come and lodge in the 

 branches thereof." Matt. 13 : 31, 32. 



Whether our common Black Mustard is the Mus- 

 tard of the parable is a question of some dispute, but 

 it is a fact that this is the Mustard cultivated through- 

 out Europe and that it grows luxuriantly in Palestine. 

 It is also known that the comparison between the size 

 of the seed and the height of the plant was proverbial 

 in the East at the time Jesus used it. The trend of 

 the evidence is strongly in favor of this weed. 



Helen Hunt, writing in "Ramona," says: "The 

 Wild Mustard of Southern California is like that 

 spoken of in the New Testament in the branches of 

 which the birds of the air may rest. Coming up out 

 of the earth so slender a stem that dozens can find a 

 starting-place in an inch, it darts up a straight, slender 

 shoot, five, ten, twenty feet high, with hundreds of 

 fine, feathery branches, locking and interlocking with 

 all the hundreds around it until it is an inextricable 



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