AFRICAN AMMONIACUM. 375 



respectively from Alpinia galanga, Willd., and A. officinarum, 1371. 

 Hance. 



5. Galangal is still used throughout Europe, but is consumed 

 most largely in Eussia. It is also used in India, and is shipped 

 to ports in the Persian Gulf and Eed Sea. [N. Eepert. /. 

 Pharm. xx. 586.] 



AFRICAN AMMONIACUM. 



(Africanisches Ammoniak-Gummiharz, von Ferula Tingitana, L.) 



THE first writer to mention Ammoniacum is said to be 1873. 

 Dioscorides, 1 who flourished in the first century, and who relates Dioscorides 

 that the drug is the juice of a species of Ferula growing about 

 Cyrene in Libya, and that it is produced near the temp]e of 

 Ammon. Whether the drug received its designation from the 

 deity or the deity from the drug, or whether both took their 

 names from the Greek word *A/t/io?, sand, in allusion to the 

 parched and sandy desert where both were found, were open 

 questions in the time of Pliny. The story, however, of the 

 Libyan origin of ammoniacum remained current for centuries Origin of the 

 among writers on Materia Medica, and considering that the drug Name - 

 was not frequently brought from Alexandria, it had about it 

 nothing improbable. 



Chardin, who passed many years in Persia (1666-1677), is Chardin. 

 probably one of the first to point out that ammoniacum is a 

 production of that country. 2 He says that the Persians call the 

 plant Ouchag, and that it grows in abundance on the southern 

 confines of Parthia, that is to say south of Ispahan, which is 

 exactly where it has been found by many travellers in modern 

 times. 



Jackson, an English merchant who resided for sixteen years 

 in Morocco and wrote an instructive account of that country, 8 

 described a sort of ammoniacum produced there by a giant fennel 

 called in Arabic Feshook. This plant, he says, grows on most Feshook. 

 of the plains of the interior, but especially about El Araiche 



1 Lib. iii. c. 88. 



9 Voyage du Chevalier Chardin en Perse, nouvelle Edition, par Langl&s, 

 Paris, iii. (1811) 298. 



3 Account of the Empire of Morocco, Lond., 1809. 



