15 
of the Poma Sodomitica. 
however, been so generally believed that we find historians and 
poets speaking of it without any expression of doubt. Tacitus, 
Strabo, and Josephus all mention it ; and Moore, who has col- 
lected so much information relative to the natural productions of 
the East, in the notes to Lalla Rookh, felicitously employs that now 
under consideration in one of his beautiful similes, — 
“ Like Dead-Sea fruits that tempt the eye. 
But turn to ashes on the lips,” — 
referring in the notes to a description of the apples of Isthakar, 
sweet on one side and bitter on the other. 
Still greater diversity of opinion has existed relative to the real 
nature of these apples. Pococke supposed them to be pomegra- 
nates which had remained on the trees for several years, whereby 
the interior is dried to dust, although the outside may remain fair. 
Hasselquist pronounced it to be the fruit of the egg-plant night- 
shade ( Solarium Melon gena ), growing near Jericho, and in the 
neighbourhood of the Dead-Sea ; and which, when attacked by a 
Tenthredo, converts the whole of the inside into dust. M. Seetzen 
supposes it to be the fruit of a species of cotton-tree growing 
on the plain of El Gbor, and called Abcschaez, having no pulp, 
but the interior filled with cotton. Chateaubriand considered that 
he had solved the question, on discovering a shrub near the mouth 
of the river Jordan, which bears a fruit like a small Egyptian 
lemon, which, before it is ripe, is filled with a corrosive saline juice, 
and, when dead, yields a blackish seed compared to ashes, and 
resembling bitter pepper in its taste. Mr. Jolliffe thought he had 
found the true Dead-Sea apples in the fruit of a shrub growing near 
Jericho, of the size of a small apricot, and of a bright yellow colour. 
And, lastly, Captains Irby and Mangles regarded it as the seed of 
the Oskar plant, growing on the shores of the Dead-Sea. Mr. 
Conder, who has collected and reviewed these various opinions in 
his description of Palestine, forming one of the volumes of “ The 
Modern Traveller ,” has considered that none of these statements 
agreed with the descriptions given by Tacitus and Josephus, adding 
with much sagacity, “It is possible, indeed, that what they describe 
“ may have originated, like the oak galls in this country, in the 
“ work of some insect, for these remarkable productions sometimes 
“ acquire a considerable size and beauty of colour.” 
On the 2d June, 1835, a memoir was read before the Linnaean 
Society by Aylmer Bourke Lambert, Esq., F. R. S., V. P. L. S., &c., 
and published in the last part of the Transactions of that Society, 
(vol. xvii. p. 445,) giving a description of the real Dead-Sea apple, 
brought from the mountains in the neighbourhood of the Dead-Sea, 
by the Hon. Robert Cur von, and “ which now proves to be a gall 
