420 PLTNT S NATURAL HISTORY. [Eook XXII. 



which has been the occasion of no few mistakes committed by 

 writers. According- to some, it is a tufted shrub, white, des- 

 titute of thorns, and with leaves like those of the olive, only 

 softer ; which eaten boiled, are an agreeable food. The roofe, 

 they say, taken in doses of one drachma in hydromel, allays 

 gripings of the bowels, and is a cure for ruptures and convul- 

 sions. Others, again, pronounce it to be a vegetable grovnng 

 near the sea-shore,®^ of a salt taste — to which, in fact, it 

 owes its name — with leaves somewhat round but elongated, 

 and much esteemed as an article of food. They say, too, that 

 there are two species of it, the wild and the cultivated,^^ and 

 that, mixed with bread, they are good, both of them, for dy- 

 senteiy, even if ulceration should have supervened, and are 

 usefid for stomachic affections, in combination with vinegar. 

 They state, also, that this plant is applied raw to ulcers of long 

 standing, and that it modifies the inflammation of recent 

 wounds, and the pain attendant upon sprains of the feet and 

 affections of the bladder. The wild halimon, they tell us, 

 has thinner leaves than the other, but is more effectual as a 

 medicament in all the above cases, as also for the cure of itch, 

 whether in man or beast. The root, too, according to them, 

 employed as a friction, renders the skin more clear, and the 

 teeth whiter ; and they assert that if the seed of it is put 

 beneath the tongue, no thirst will be experienced. They 

 state, also, that this kind is eaten as well as the other, and that 

 they are, both of them, preserved. 



Crateuas has spoken of a third^*^ kind also, Avith longer 

 leaves than the others, and more hairy : it has the smell of 

 the cypress, he says, and grows beneath the ivy more particu- 

 larly. He states that this plant is extremely good for 

 opisthotony and contractions of the sinews, taken in doses of 

 three oboli to one sextarius of water. 



s* Hence its name, liXiiiov, from a\g, the "sea,*' and not, as Pliny says, 

 from its salt taste. 



^^ " Mitius." Fee says that if this word means "cultivated," the 

 plant mentioned cannot be the Atriplex halimus ; in which case he is 

 indined to identify it with the Atriplex portulacoides of Linnaeus ; the 

 leaves and young stalks of which, preserved in vinegar, have an agreeable 

 taste. 



^ Some other plant, probably, Fee thinks. 



