BOOK XXIV. xLi. 67-XLii. 70 



XLI. Lenaeus calls the myrice (tamarisk) erica Tamansk. 

 (heath), comparing it to the brooms of Ameria. He 

 says that boiled in wine, beaten up with honey, and 

 appHed to cancerous sores it heals them. Some 

 authorities consider it to be the same as tamarice. 

 But it is specific for splenic trouble if its juice is 

 extracted and drunk in wine ; so wonderful do they 

 make out its antipathy to be to this internal organ, 

 and to this only, that they affirm that if pigs drink 

 out of troughs made of this wood they are found to be 

 without a spleen. And for that reason they give to 

 a man also, if he has an enlarged spleen, food and 

 drink in vessels made of tamarisk. A respected 

 medical authority, moreover, has asserted that a 

 twig, broken off from it without its touching the 

 ground or iron, reUeves belly-ache, if it be so 

 appUed as to be pressed to the body by the tunic and 

 the girdle. The common people, as I have said, call 

 this tree imlucky, because it bears no fruit and never 

 is planted.* 



XLII. Corinth and the part of Greece around it call Brya. 

 brya a tree of which they distinguish two kinds : the 

 wild, which is absolutely barren, and the cultivated. 

 The latter in Egypt and Syria bears, and that abun- 

 dantly, large-stoned fruit bigger than a gall-nut and 

 bitter to the taste, which physicians use instead of 

 gall-nuts in the medical mixtures which they call 

 antherae. The wood also, and the blossom, leaves and 

 bark, are used for the same purposes, although they 

 are less potent. The pounded bark is given for the 

 spitting of blood and for excessive menstruation, also 

 to sufferers from coeliac disease.'' An appHcation of 



describe pyloric spasm and intestinal atony, referring also to 

 Aretaeus II. 7 TTepl Koi.XiaK^s SiaSeaioj. See list of diseases, 



53 



