NAT. ORDER. LUGUMNOSvE. 
149 
scattered prickles beneath, like the main rachis, which is elegantly 
curved ; leaflets very minute and delicate, apparently smooth and 
naked, but throug-h the lens minutely and irregularly puberulous, es- 
pecially at the edges ; they close up and lose all their beauty about 
four or five o'clock in the afternoon ; the spikes (not heads) of flowers 
are short and oblong-, pale ochre -yellow, produced four or five tog-ether 
from the axils of the upper leaves, which become less and less devel- 
oped towards the ends of the branches, so as to form a long-, irreg-ular 
sort of a terminal, leafy, compound, branched panicle ; shg-htly fra- 
g-rant ; pedicles^ half to three quarters of an inch long-, round, unarmed, 
densely 'fulvo-pubescent ; spikes oblong-, abbreviate, and about half an 
inch long- ; calyx very minutely pubescent, in five shallow seg-mets like 
the corolla, both pale green ; stamens very numerous ; anthers simple ; 
seeds numerous, ten to twelve, rather large, flattened, but convex in 
the middle. 
Though the flowers of this plant are not i-emarkably conspicuous, it 
is impossible to conceive of anything more graceful and elegant than 
the thick tufted, feathery foliag-e, or the extreme delicacy and symme- 
try of its parts. The pod and seed are singularly large in proportion 
to the rest of the plant. 
This is the shrub which yields the gum-arabic of the shops, and 
succus acacice. According to Hasselquist, the Arabs call it chasad. 
The gum is gathered in vast quantities from the trees or shrubs grow- 
ing in Arabia Petrsea, near the north bay of the Eed Sea, at the foot 
of Mount Sinai. This gum is called by the dealers 17mr or Thor, 
which is the name of the harbor in the north bay of the Red Sea, 
thereby distinguishing- it from gum-arabic. The gum-thur is also more 
pellucid and white, whereas gum-arabic is of a brown or dirty color, 
and generally opaque. 
Gum-arabic is a concrete juice which exudes from various species 
of Acacia, but especially from Acacia vera, Acacia Arabic, and Aca-' 
cia Senegal, natives of the sandy deserts of Africa, Arabia, and other 
parts of Asia. It either exudes spontaneously or from incisions made 
