The History of the Rose. 13 



the usual price asked for the Rose-water, and for which it is sold, I should consider 

 there is a profit of 40,000 rupees. The natives are very fond of using the Rose-water 

 as a medicine or as a vehicle for other mixtures ; and they consume a good deal of 

 the petals for the Conserve of Roses." 



But Roses are grown for the purpose of manufacturing Rose-water in other 

 countries besides India, Persia, and Turkey. At Provins, a town forty-seven miles 

 S.E. of Paris, which has long been celebrated for its Conserve of Roses, the French 

 Rose has been cultivated ; and in the environs of Paris, the Damask and other kinds. 

 In some parts of Surrey and Kent, in our own country, they are grown in considerable 

 quantities the Provence, Damask, and French kinds, indiscriminately. In the 

 process of distillation, six pounds of Rose-leaves are said to be enough to make a 

 gallon of Rose-water ; but much depends on the stage in which the flowers are 

 gathered, the best stage being just before full-blown. 



The Rose has been valued in medicine from the remotest times ; it was so in the 

 time of Hippocrates ; and the Romans believed the root to be efficacious in cases of 

 hydrophobia ; hence probably the term " DOG-ROSE." Many writers have attributed 

 to it virtues which it does not possess, though it is still used in medicine, and valued 

 for its tonic and astringent properties. The hips of the Dog-Rose, when reduced to 

 pulp, are also used in pharmacy, to give consistence to pills and electuaries. 



But to return more immediately to the history of the Rose. This flower having 

 been considered as the emblem of innocence and purity from remote times, seems so 

 far to have influenced the early Christian writers as to induce them to place it in 

 Paradise. It is well known, also, that the seal of the celebrated Luther was a Rose. 



In Hungary our flower is held in great esteem. I am informed by a friend who 

 has resided in that country that it is customary with ladies of rank and fashion to 

 take bouquets of roses and go into the woods to bud the wild kinds which they may 

 encounter in their rambles. It must be an agreeable and exhilarating task to go in 

 search of these Roses during the flowering season of the following year ; and I am 

 assured it is no uncommon thing to meet with the finest varieties blooming in the 

 most unfrequented places. 



" In Lower Hungary, where the iron road traverses long stretches of flat country, 

 akin in conformation and aspect to the Russian steppes or to the prairies of Western 

 America, hedges of Rose trees, thick and tall, cover both flanks of the snow-beset 

 metals, and repel the fiercest onslaughts of their fleecy foe. On the State railways of 

 the Banat, on the outlying regions of Magyarland, a section of the line nearly a mile 

 and a-half in length, which in former years invariably became blocked by the snow, 

 has been kept clear during the abnormally heavy falls of the past winter by one of 

 these double rose hedges averaging 6 feet 6 inches in height and about 3 feet in thick- 

 ness. This stout bulwark in summer time bisecting the dusky ' purzta ' with twin 

 streaks of gay green, aglow with rich colour and redolent of sweet fragrance has 



