A PASSING GLANCE AT THE FLORA OF PALESTINE. 191 
Jericho, where the plant used to be cultivated not only for its 
pretty pinkish-white blossoms and powerful aromatic fragrance, 
but also because it yielded the henna of oriental commerce, with 
which women dyed their fingers brown. It is another striking 
proof of the local accuracy of the Bible when it speaks of the 
Camphire of Engedi ; for the plant is only found there, in a wild 
state, in Palestine ; and it was from this place that it was intro- 
duced into the gardens of Jericho. The Soap-plant (Salicorma 
Jruticosa) abounded everywhere. It is called by the Bedouins 
Kali, and is used by them for soap, as kelp used to be on our 
Scottish coasts. It is from the Arabic name of this plant that 
our word alkali comes. Very prevalent and most remarkable 
were the bushes of Anabasis or Salsola articulata, with their 
slender twigs composed of short, succulent, jointed segments. They 
accumulated round their roots wind-blown hillocks of sand, where 
ants and lizards burrowed. The Bedouins call this bush Rumth. 
So abundant is it about Sinai that a valley of the district is called 
Wady Rimthi, from the abundance of the Anabasis bushes in it. 
A vast number of snails of Helix Seetzeni adhered to the bushes. 
I observed one specimen of perhaps the most curious plant of 
Palestine, the Osher or true Apple of Sodom, or Apple of the 
Dead Sea—the Calotropis procera. It is a shrub of the Asclepiad 
family, with a light cork-like bark and large glossy leaves, which 
emit when punctured a flow of acrid milk. There is nothing like 
it in our European flora. Its blossom is like that of a small 
Magnolia, and the fruit, which it bears at the same time on 
different parts of the bush, is about the size and shape and colour 
of an orange. When fully ripe it cracks open like a puff-ball, 
revealing, instead of the delicious juicy flesh which its outside 
indicated, nothing but a tuft of dry seeds winged with silky 
filaments. The Bedouins, according to the old ‘“ Doctrine of 
Signatures,” or the “similia similibus curantur” principle, give 
the milky juice of the leaves to women when unable to suckle 
their offspring, in order to procure an abundant supply of milk. 
In the valley of the Jordan, the only place where the Osher is 
found wild is at Engedi; but here and there an escape from the 
gardens where it is cultivated occurs. Its native country is in all 
probability Midian or Nubia, for in these countries it attains to 
the stature of a tree, with a trunk two feet in circumference, and 
