252 DICTIONAKY OF POPULAR NAMES LOTOS 



Tlie trees around them all tlieir fruit produce, 



Lotos tlie name, divine nectarious juice, 



WMcIl whoso tastes, 



Insatiate riots in the sweet repasts ; 



Nor other home, nor other care mtends, 



But quits his house, his country, and his friends.'* 



In order to assist in. the determining any unknown plant, a 

 knowledge of its native country is of special value. Here we 

 have a tree called Lotos, the fruit of which, to liim who eats it 

 for the first time, is so delicious as to make him wish for no 

 other home than the Flowery Land of the Lotos tree. Homer 

 does not inform us in what country this desirable home was 

 situated; but, according to commentators in ancient history, 

 it is considered to be an island or country on the African coast, 

 near the ancient Lesser Syrtes, situated on the coast known in 

 modern times as Barbary, which comprehends Algeria and Tunis. 

 Presuming that such might be the case, and that Homer's story 

 of the Lotos tree is not all poetic fiction, and as dates no doubt 

 then, as they do now, formed one of the principal articles of 

 food to the inhabitants of those parts of Africa, and not beinc^ 

 known in Greece, we may readily suppose that the three Greek 

 sailors would eat of them, and on their return to Greece would 

 speak of them in such terms as to say they would wish for no 

 other home, and this saying coming to the knowledge of Homer, 

 furnished him with the idea of the Lotos. By subsequent 

 writers, the people of the country of the Lotos tree were called 

 Lotophagi, and various opinions were formed as to the identity 

 of the Lotos tree. The first worthy of notice is that of Dios- 

 corides, a Greek physician and writer on plants, who flourished 

 about the middle of the first century (950 years after Homer), 

 who, in a manuscript still extant in the library at Florence, 

 figures and describes under the name of Lotos a tree known to 

 modern botany as Celtis australis, a small tree of the Elm 

 family, common on both shores of the Mediterranean, bearing 

 abundance of sweet berries ; and being known to the Greeks, 

 it therefore can have no claim to be the Lotos of Homer, any 



