/ 
296 ORD. XVII. Bicornes. STYRAX BENZOIN, 
their descriptions of it are so imperfect and insufficient for its bo- 
tanical determination, that succeeding botanists have fallen into 
many errors concerning it; and it is remarkable, that although this 
drug was always imported from the East-Indies, most of the later: 
writers on the Materia Medica have conceived it to be collected 
from a species of Laurus, native of Virginia, to which, from this 
erroneous supposition, they have given the trivial name of Benzoin. 
This mistake seems to have originated with Mr. Ray, who in his 
Historia Plantarum, vol. ii, p. 1845, at the end of his account of the 
Arbor Benivifera of Garcias, says, “ Ad nos scripsit D. Tancredus 
«Robinson Arborem resiniferam odoratam follis citrinis pradicte 
« haud absimilem transmissam fuisse e Virginia a D. Banister, ad 
« jljustrissimum Prasulem D. Henr. Compton, in cujus instruc- 
‘© tissimo horto culta est—Arbor ista Virginiana Citrii, vel Limonii 
“ foliis Benzoinum fundens, in horto reverendissimi Episcopi’ 
“ cylta.” This error was detected by Linnzus, but another was 
substituted by him in its place;* for in his Mantissa Plantarum 
Altera he tells us, that Benjamin is furnished by a shrub described 
there under the name of Croton Benzoé, and afterwards, in the 
Supplementum Plantarum, describes again the same plant, under 
the name of Terminalia Benzoin. M. Jacquin, who had been in- 
formed that this shrub was called by the French Bienjoint, supposes, 
with reason, that the similar sound of that word with Benjoin, the 
French name for Benjamin, may have occasioned this mistake.* 
Since that period, Dr. Houttuyn has described the Benjamin tree 
of Sumatra; but for want of good specimens has been so unfor- 
tunate as to mistake the genus to which it belongs.’ 
This tree, which isa native of Sumatra, is deemed, in six years,” 
of sufficient age for affording the Benzoine, or when its trunk, ac- 
* This discovery was not made till after the publication of his Spec. Plant. where 
it stands as a laurus, 
4 Hort. Vindob. vol. iit. p. 51. 
: Houttuyn had the specimens from atete from which he doletmisied: the 
txee to be a laurus, 
