192 PARSONS ON THE ROSE. 



for they were entirely ignorant of the art of distillation, 

 which only came into practice after the invention of the 

 alembic by the Arabs. Some attribute this discovery to 

 Rhazes, an Arabian physician, who lived in the early part 

 of the tenth century; and others attribute it to Avicenna, 

 who lived at Chyraz, in the latter part of the same cen- 

 tury. It is also attributed to Geber, a celebrated Arabian 

 alchemist, who lived in Mesojiotamia in the eighth cen- 

 tury. Subsequent, therefore, to this discovery of the 

 alembic, we find, according to Gmelin, in his history of 

 the preparation of distilled waters, that the first notice 

 of rose-water is by Aben-Zohar, a Jewish physician, of 

 Seville, in Spain, who recommends it for diseases of the 

 eye. From the Arabs, this invention passed among the 

 Greeks and Romans, as we are informed by Actuarius, a 

 writer of the eleventh or twelfth century. 



In France, the first distillation of rose-water appears to 

 have been made by Arnaud de Villeneuve, a physician, 

 who lived in the latter part of the thirteenth century. 



The Orientals made great use of this water in various 

 ways in their houses, and in the purification of their tem- 

 ples when they thought they had been profaned by any 

 other worship than that of Mahomet. There are many 

 anecdotes told by historians of the use of rose-water by 

 the Sultans on various occasions ; and several of these, as 

 Chateaubriand remarks, are stories worthy of the East. 

 It is related of Saladin, that when he took Jerusalem from 

 the Crusaders, in 1187, he would not enter the Mosque of 

 Omar, which had been converted into a church by the 

 Christians, until the walls and courts had been thorough- 

 ly washed and purified with rose-water brought from Da- 

 mascus. Five hundred camels, it is stated, were scarcely 

 sufiicient to convey all the rose-water used for this pur- 

 pose. An Arabian writer tells us that the princes of the 

 family of Saladin, hastening to Jerusalem to worship 

 Allah, Malek- Abdul, and his nephew, Taki-Eddin, distin- 



