THE ODOUR OF ROSE. 25 
for many mixed perfumes ; the Adir of Bombay is compounded of 
santal, violets, orange-flower, rosewater, musk, and spikenard. 
Apart from the systematic adulteration of Otto of Rose, which 
gives us a false idea of the true perfume, the quality would 
undoubtedly be finer if the rough apparatus now used in the East 
for its extraction were replaced by modern appliances, and if 
greater care were taken in the process of the distillation. The 
quality would especially be improved by removing all the calyces, 
seed-receptacles, bits of stalk, and in fact carefully rejecting every 
green particle of the plant, as such contain, as above explained, 
oils and oleo-resins of very different and deteriorating odours. 
The rose cultivated in Bulgaria for the otto has been clearly 
identified by botanists as the R. Damascena, Miller, the Red 
Damask rose. It is a native of Syria, and is distinguished from 
the R. centifolia by the greater size of its spines, green bark, elon- 
gated fruit, and longer reflexed sepals. It forms a small branching 
shrub, reaching the height of 5 or 6 feet ; the branches are spread- 
ing and rise from the bottom of the stem; until they become old 
they are covered with brown, straight, very closely set spines, 
sometimes a centimetre in length. The leaves are about 10 to 15 
centimetres long, composed of seven folioles which are unequal, 
sessile, elliptical, non-acuminate and sharply serrate ; their upper 
surfaces are bright green and glabrous; the under surfaces are of 
a dull glaucous colour, the margins and nerves being finely pube- 
scent. The petiole is furnished with recurved spines and is 
covered with short glandulous brown hairs. 
The flowers are grouped in 2- or 3-flowered cymes. The branches 
bear on the average seven flowers, and in good years as many as 
thirteen have been counted. The peduncles are slender and about 4 
centimetres long, bristling with numerous very fine spines inter- 
mixed with glandulous hairs which render the stalk very sticky to 
the touch. (The workmen who gather the flowers find that their 
fingers become hardened so that they do not feel the pricking of 
the thorns, but they become covered with a dark resinous sub- 
stance emanating from the glands of the flower-stalks ; the odour 
of this substance is strongly terebenaceous, and at the end of the 
day is scraped off the fingers, rolled into balls, and kept for mixing 
with tobacco in cigarettes.) 
The small receptacle (seed-vessel) is almost conical and gra- 
dually diminishing in size to the stalk ; this also is full of resious 
