MYRRH. I6i3 



being unacquainted with its flowers and fruit." However this loss 

 was supplied by the industry of Mr. Wallis, captain of the Dolphin* 

 who returned from the South Seas in 1768, bringing with him se- 

 veral botanical specimens of the Winter's bark-tree, one of which 

 came into the possession of Dr. John Fothergill, who caused an en- 

 graving of it to be made by Ehret, which is published, together with 

 its botanical description written by Dr. Solander, in the fifth volume 

 of the Medical Observations and Inquiries. 



[Murray. Aiton. Miller, IVoodviile. 



section x. 



Myrrh. 

 Mimosa Troglodyte. Bruce. 



Botany, even medical botany, is still in a very imperfect state, 

 notwithstanding all the pains that have been taken during the last 

 half century, more especially to obtain accuracy. The two or three 

 last sections have offered us proofs of this to a certain extent : and 

 the material before u: is still more in point ; for at this hour we 

 are totally ignorant of the tree that produces it. This tree we have 

 called, indeed, a Mimosa, upon I he authority of Bruce, who regards 

 it as a co- species of the Acacia vera, which is unquestionably a 

 species of mimosa *. His history and description of this ancient 

 and elegant gum.-resin is as follows. 



" The ancients, and especially Dioscorides, spoke of myrrh in such 

 a manner as to make us suppose, either that they have described a 

 drug which they had never seen ; or that the drug seen and de- 

 scribed by them is absolutely unknown to modern naturalists and 

 physicians. The Arabs, however, who form the link of the chain 

 between the Greek physicians and ours, in whose country the 

 myrrh was produced, and whose language gave it its name, have 

 left us undeniable evidence, that what we know by the name of 

 myrrh, is in nothing different from the myrrh of the ancients, grow, 

 ing in the same countries from which it was brought formerly to 

 Greece ; that is, from the east coast of Arabia Felix, bordering on 

 the Indian Ocean, and that low land in Abyssinia on the south-east 

 of the Red Sea, included nearly between the 12th and 13th degree 



* See chapter vii. sect, article Gum Arabic, Mimosa Nilotica. 



M2 



