204 



A DISCOURSE 



1500K III. some are nipt and starved with that ^^w<?/r«ii/^ j^/^m*, and others ruined 

 ^'^^'^^"^ by tlie scorching heat, quite changing almost their very nature and con- 

 stitution ; some of them are dry, yielding nothing but leaves ; others of 

 the same species, are gummy, juicy, and succulent. The Lentiscus yields 

 mastich in Cio ; in Italy, the Oak bears galls ; and the Fraxinus exudes 

 manna in Calabria : thus do Coelum and Solum govern the vegetable 



Latin version of his Arabic says, " That the dry Hyssop grows upon the mountains of 

 Jerusalem, and extends its branches over the ground to the length of a cubit, or near it." 

 Ben Omram was upon the spot ; he speaks from his own knowledge, and I apprehend that 

 his cubit wanted but two or three inches of two English feet. Christ was crucified upon 

 the mountains where this Hyssop grew ; and there can be no doubt, that if the branch was not 

 sufficient for the purpose of which St. John speaks, the stem, however, could not but be so. 

 Suppose the Hyssop of the East to be the same plant with ours, that it might, nevertheless, 

 be of much larger growth, seems probable, from this circumstance, that the Mustard vfas. 

 Lighlfoot and Tremellius have quoted two passages from the Talmud, in one of which we are 

 told of a Mustard-tree, one of the boughs of which covered the tent of a potter : and in the 

 other, of another tree of the same kind, the owner of which was wont to climb it, as men 

 climb up a fig-tree. Now, though these stories may deserve no farther credit, yet certainly 

 so much is due to them, as to induce us to believe that the Mustard was a large, tall, 

 strong plant. To have feigned such exaggerations concerning a plant which never 

 had these characters, could only have discredited and disgraced both the authors and the 

 propagators of the story. Pliny, in the ninth chapter of the nineteenth book of his Natural 

 History, says^ that at Rosea, in the country of the Sabines, the hemp plant grows to the 

 height of a tree. And Maldonat, a Spanish commentator, says, that in Spain he has often 

 seen the Mustard used instead of wood for heating large ovens to bake bread ; that he 

 has seen large woods of Mustard, ( magnas sylvas,) and birds sitting upon the trees, though 

 he never observed that they built their nests in them. To this we may add what is said 

 of the Milium, and the Sesamum by Herodotus (•>), whose credulity, as to what he heard, is 

 indeed blamable enough ; but whose veracity, as to what he saw, is not to be called in 

 question. Speaking of the country about Babylon, he says, " How great a tree proceeds 

 from the Milium, and from the Sesamum, though I know certainly, I will not say, being well 

 persuaded that with those who have never been in this country, what I have said of its 

 wheat and barley, will meet with little credit." Innumerable instances may be produced 

 to shew that soil and climate are capable of making that a large tree in one country, which 

 is only a shrub in another ; and why may not the same law operate with the same force 

 upon the herbaceous vegetable? Nay, soil alone, in the same climate, produces a wonderful 

 diversity of dimension. The Marygold, which, in a moist and fat earth, rises two feet high, 

 scarce exceeds the same number of inches in a dry and gravelly soil. 



h Herod. Clio. Ed. fol. Gronovii, p. 78. 



