MASTICHE. 168 



personal observation to the great care with which the lentisk was 

 cultivated by the inhabitants. 



When Tournefort^ was at Scio in 1701, all the lentisk trees on the 

 island were held to be the property of the Grand Signor, and if any 

 laud was sold, the sale did not include the lentisks that might be 

 growing on it. At that time the mastich villages, about twenty in 

 number, were required to pay 286 chests of mastich annually to the 

 Turkish officers appointed to receive the revenue. 



In the beginning of the present century, when Olivier- paid a visit 

 to the island of Chios, he found 50,000 ocche (one occa=2-82 lb. avdp. 

 = 128 kilogrammes) or somewhat more to be the annual harvest of 

 mastich. 



The month of January, 1850, was memorable throughout Greece 

 and the Archipelago for a frost of unparalleled severity which proved 

 very destructive to the mastich trees of Scio, and occasioned a scarcity 

 of the drug that lasted for many years.' 



The foreofoincr statements show that for centuries past Scio or Chios 

 was famed for this resin ; there are however a few evidences proving 

 that at least a little mastich used also to be collected in other islands. 

 Amari^ quoted an Arabic geographer of the 12th century speaking of 

 " il niaMice di Pantellana cavato da lentiscJii e lo storace odorifero." 

 Pantellaria, Kossura of the ancients, is the small volcanic island south- 

 west of Sicily, not far from Tunis. In a list enumerating the drugs 

 to be met with in 1582 in the fair of Frankfurt ' we find even mastich 

 of Cyprus quoted as superior to the common. Cyprian mastich again 

 occurs in the pharmaceutical tarifis of 1612 and 1669 of the same city, 

 and in many others of that time.* 



The disuse into which mastich has fallen makes it difficult to under- 

 stand its ancient importance ; but a glance at the pharmacopoeias of the 

 15th, 16th, and 17th centuries shows that it was an ingredient of a 

 large number of compound medicines." 



Secretion — In the bark of the stems and branches of the mastich 

 shrub, there are resin-ducts like those in the aromatic roots of Umbelli- 

 ferce or Com-positce. In Pistacia they may even be shown in the 

 petioles. The wood is devoid of resin,^ so that slight incisions are suffi- 

 cient to provoke the resinous exudation, the bark being not very thick, 

 and liable to scale off 



Collection — In Scio incisions are made about the middle of June 

 in the bark of the stems and principal branches. From these incisions 

 which are vertical and very close together, the resin speedily flows, and 



1 Voyage into the Levant, i. (1718) 285. *Sf(yriadeiMmulmanidiSicilia,m.{lS72) 



- Voyage dans FEmpire Othoman et la 787. 



Perse, ii. (Paris, 1801) 132-136. ^ymctiger, Documente zur Geschichte der 



' At Athens the mercury was for a short Pharmacie, Halle, 1876. 31. 



time at —10' C. (14" F.) In Scio, where ^ Ihid. 41. 65. 



the frost was probably quite as severe, "• Thus in the London Pharmacopceia of 



though we have no exact data, the mischief 1632, mastich enters into 24 of the 37 dif- 



to the lentisks varied ^-ith the locality, ferent kinds of pill, besides which it is pre- 



trees exposed to the north or growing at scribed in troches and ointments, 



considerable elevations, being killed down * See Unger and Kotsehy, Die Tnsel 



to the base of the trunk, while those in Cypern, Wien, 1865. 424. 

 more favoured positions suffered destmc- 

 tion only in some of their branches. 



