AEAR THEE. 391 



shoots from the stumps of trees that had been cut or burnt 

 down, though possibly their impoverished habit may have been 

 due to the sterility of the soil. The largest were in the Ourika 

 valley, and were about thirty feet high (see p. 177). In many 

 cases the stem swelled out at the very base into a roundish mass 

 half buried in soil, which is said to attain even four feet in 

 diameter, though we saw none approaching that size. 



It is the basal portion, whether the result of mutilation or 

 natural growth, that affords the wood so prized by ancients and 

 moderns, and which forms a most valuable article of export from 

 Algiers to Paris, where small articles of furniture, &c., are made 

 of it and sold at very high prices. 



Under the name of Citrus wood, it is alluded to, according 

 to Daubeny, by Martial and Lucan, and by Horace (' Oarm.' lib. 

 iv. Od. 1), who suggests its employment as the most precious 

 commodity that could be selected for a temple in which a marble 

 statue of Venus should be placed : — 



Albanos, prope te, lacus 



Ponet marmoream sub trabe cilrea ; 



Also Petronius Arbiter, descanting upon the luxury of the 

 Romans, seems to represent it as woith more than its weight in 

 gold, when he says — 



Ecce Afris eruta terris 

 Ponitur, ac maciilis imitatur villus aurum 

 Citrea mensa. 



For a detailed description of what was known of this tree 

 to the ancients, and of its value, we must refer to the description 

 in Pliuy (' Nat. Hist.' book xiii. chaps. 29, 30). This author 

 describes it as the thyion and thyia of Homer and the Greeks, and 

 adds that its wood was used with the unguents burnt for their 

 pleasant odour by Circe ; as also that Theophrastus awarded a 

 high rank to it, the timber being used for roofing temples and 

 being indestructible ; as also that it is produced in the lower 

 part of Cyrenaica, and that the finest kind grows ia the vicinity 

 of the temple of Jupiter Ammon. 



Pliny himself gives Mount Atlas as the native country of 

 the wood ; in the vicinity of which, he says, is Mauritania, a 

 country in which abounds a tree which has given rise to the mania 



