MENTIONED IN THE GOSPELS. 
439 
unable to reconcile the account of it there given, with its 
appearance in their own country, because they are strongly 
influenced by associations formed in early life, when they 
judge of the productions of other countries. 
Even scientific botanists, who have not weighed well the 
popular, poetical, and rhetorical language of the sacred 
writings, have been at a great loss what to determine con- 
cerning the mustard plant of the Gospels ; and, after study- 
ing the subject for a time, given it up in despair. 
Mr Frost, F. A. S. with laudable zeal, has endeavoured 
to ascertain what plant in modern botany answered to the 
mustard plant of the Gospels ; and, after much considera- 
tion, he has come to the belief, that the mustard plant of 
the Gospels was not any plant to which we now give that 
name, but a species of phytolacca, viz. the phytolacca dode- 
candra of Linnaeus. 
This result of his inquiries first appeared in the 20th 
volume of the Journal of Sciences and Arts, and in 182T 
he published it as a separate treatise, in 8vo. with an en- 
graving of the plant. 
This plant, he affirms, grows abundantly in Palestine. 
It has the smallest seed, and rises to the greatest size, of 
any plant in that country. Its seed is used for culinary 
and medicinal purposes, as well as that of the common 
mustard ; and in America, it goes by the name of mus- 
tard. On these grounds, he thinks that there is the high- 
est probability that it was included by the ancients under 
the name of mustard. 
We have two questions to ask. Is he certain, that a 
Jew was accustomed to take the seed of the phytolacca 
dodecandra, and sow it in his field or garden ? If it grew 
in the mountains, or valleys of Palestine ; if it was a tree in 
the forest of Lebanon, or in the wood of Ephraim ; it could 
not be the mustard of the Gospels, which a man took and 
