HERBA SABIN.E. 627 



ascends in the Balkha«ch and Alatau niountaiiLS to 8,600 feet. In 

 North America it has been gathered on the banks of the river Saskatch- 

 ewan, at Lake Huron, in Newfoundland, and in Saint Pierre and 

 Miquelon. There are, however, a few very closely allied species which 

 may occasionally have been confounded with savin. 



History — Savin is mentioned as a veterinary drug by Marcus 

 Porcius Cato,' a Roman writer on husbandly who flourished in the 

 second century B.C.; and it was well known to Dioscorides (under the 

 name of ^pdSv) and Pliny. The plant, which is frequently named in 

 the early English leech-books written l^efore the Norman Conquest," 

 may probably have been introduced into Britain by the Romans. 

 Charlemagne, A.D. 812, ordered that it should be cultivated on the 

 imperial farms of Central Europe. Its virtues as a stinuilating appli- 

 cation to wounds and ulcers are noticed in the verses of Macer Floridus,^ 

 composed in the 10th centur3^ 



Description — The medicinal part of savin is the young and tender 

 green shoots, stripped from the more woody twigs and branches. These 

 are clothed with minute scale-like rhomboid leaves, arranged alternately 

 in opposite pairs. On the younger twigs they are closely adpressed, 

 thick, concave, rounded on the back, in the middle of which is a con- 

 spicuous depres.sed oil gland. As the shoots grow older the leaves 

 l^ecome more pointed and divergent from the stem. Savin evolves, when 

 rubbed or bruised, a strong and not disagi'eeable odour. The blackish 

 fruit or galbulus resembling a small berry, ^o of an inch in diameter, 

 grows on a short recurved stalk' and is covered with a blue bloom. It 

 is globular, dry, but abounding in essential oil, and contains 1 to 4 

 little bony nuts. 



To mycologists, Juniperus Sabma, at least in the cultivated state, 

 is interesting on account of the parasitic fungus Podisoma fuscum 

 Duby, the mycelium of which produces, on the leaves of the pear-trees, 

 the so-called Roestelia cancellata Rebentisch. 



Chemistry — The odour of sa%-in is due to an essential oil, of which 

 the fresh tops afford 2 to 4 per cent, and the berries about 10 per cent. 

 Examined in a column oO millimetres long it was found to deviate the 

 ray of polarized light 27° to the right, the oil used having been distilled 

 by one of us in London from the fresh plant cultivated at Mitcham. 

 The same result was obtained from the oil abstracted ten years pre- 

 viously from savin collected wild on the Alps of the Canton de Vaud, 

 Switzerland. We find that, by the prolonged action of the air, if the 

 oil is kept in a vessel not carefully closed, the rotatory power after the 

 lapse of years is greatly reduced. Sa^^n oil, according to Tilden (1877), 

 yields a small amount of an oil boiling at 160°, which answers to the 

 formula C'^ff^O. The greater part of the oil was found by that chemist 

 to boil above 200° C. Tilden asserts that no terpene is present in the 

 oil of savin; we have not been able to obtain from it a crystallized 

 hydrochloride. Savin tops contain traces of tannic matter. 



' Cap. Ixx. (Bubus medicamentum). herharum, Lipsiae, 1832. 48. ... " Dnp- 



- Cock&yne, Leechdoms, etc., of Earlt/ En;/- Inm si desunt cinnama poni In medica- 



larul, ii. (1865) xii. mentis iubet Oribasius aiictor." 

 * Choulaut, Macer Floridiut de viribtis 



