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OF THE

FIFTH VOLUME.

INTRODUCTION, P. i

OF PLANTS, SHRUBS, AND TREES.

OF QUADRUPEDS.

OF BIRDS.

MAPS.

INTRODUCTION.

As it has been my endeavour, throughout this history, to leave nothing unexplained that may assist the reader in understanding the different subjects that have been treated in the course of it, I think myself obliged to say a few words concerning the manner of arranging this Appendix. With regard to the Natural History, it must occur to every one, that, however numerous and respectable they may be who have dedicated themselves entirely to this study, they bear but a very small proportion to those who, for amusement or instruction, seek the miscellaneous and general occurrences of life that ordinarily compose a series of travels.

Some further consideration was necessary in placing the maps, and the Appendix appeared to me to be by far the most proper part for them. The maps, whether such as are general of the country, or those adapted to serve particular itineraries, should always be laid open before the reader, till he has made himself perfectly master of the bearings and distances of the principal rivers, mountains, or provinces where the scene of action is then laid. Maps that fold lie generally but one way, and are mostly of strong paper, so that when they are doubled by an inattentive hand, contrary to the original fold they got at binding, they break, and come asunder in quarters and square pieces, the map is destroyed, and the book ever after incomplete; whereas, even if this misfortune happens to a map placed in the Appendix, it may either be taken out and joined anew, or replaced at very little expence by a fresh map from the bookseller.

I shall detain the reader but a few minutes with what I have further to say concerning the particular subjects of Natural History of which I have treated. The choice I know, though it may meet with the warmest concurrence from one set of readers, will not perhaps be equally agreeable to the taste of others. This I am heartily sorry for. My endeavour and wish is to please them all, if it were possible, as it is not.

The first subject I treat of is trees, shrubs, or plants; and in the selecting of them I have preferred those which, having once been considered as subjects of consequence by the ancients, and treated largely of by them, are now come, from want of the advantage of drawing, lapse of time, change of climate, alteration of manners, or accident befallen the inhabitants of a country, to be of doubtful existence and uncertain description; the ascertaining of many of these is necessary to the understanding the classics.

It is well known to every one the least versant in this part of Natural History, what a prodigious revolution has happened in the use of drugs, dyes, and gums, since the time of Galen, by the introduction of those Herculean medicines drawn from minerals. The discovery of the new world, besides, has given us vegetable medicines nearly as active and decisive as those of minerals themselves. Many found in the new world grow equally in the old, from which much confusion has arisen in the history of each, that will become inextricable in a few generations, unless attended to by regular botanists, assisted by attentive and patient draughts-men ignorant of system, or at least not slaves to it, who set down upon paper what with their eyes they see does exist, without amusing themselves with imagining, according to rules they have themselves made, what it regularly should be. One drawing of this kind, painfully and attentively made, has more merit, and promotes true knowledge more certainly, than a hundred horti sicci which constantly produce imaginary monsters, and throw a doubt upon the whole. The modern and more accurate system of botany has fixed its distinctions of genus and species upon a variety of such fine parts naturally so fragil, that drying, spreading, and pressing with the most careful hands, must break away and destroy some of those parts. These deficient in one plant, exiting in another in all other respects exactly similar, are often, I fear, construed into varieties, or different species, and well if the misfortune goes no farther. They are precisely of the same bad consequence as an inaccurate drawing, where these parts are left out through inattention, or design.

After having bestowed my first consideration upon these that make a principal figure in ancient history, which are either not at all or imperfectly known now, my next attention has been to those which have their uses in manufactures, medicine, or are used as food in the countries I am describing.

The next I have treated are the plants, or the varieties of plants, unknown, whether in genus or species. In these I have dealt sparingly in proportion to the knowledge I yet have acquired in this subject, which is every day increasing, and appears perfectly attainable.

The history of the birds and beasts is the subject which occupies the next place in this Appendix; and the rule I follow here, is to give the preference to such of each kind as are mentioned in scripture, and concerning which doubts have arisen. A positive precept that says, Thou shalt not eat such beast, or such bird, is absolutely useless, as long as it is unknown what that bird and what that animal is.

Many learned men have employed themselves with success upon these topics, yet much remains still to do; for it has generally happened, that those perfectly acquainted with the language in which the scriptures were written, have never travelled nor seen the animals of Judea, Palestine, or Arabia; and again, such as have travelled in these countries, and seen the animals in question, have been either not at all, or but superficially acquainted with the original language of scripture. It has been my earnest desire to employ the advantage I possess in both these requisites, to throw as much light as possible upon the doubts that have arisen. I hope I have done this freely, fairly, and candidly; if I have at all succeeded, I have obtained my reward.

As for the fishes and other marine productions of the Red Sea, my industry has been too great for my circumstances. I have by me above 300 articles from the Arabian gulf alone, all of equal merit with those specimens which I have here laid before the public. Though I have selected a very few articles only, and these perhaps not the most curious, yet as they are connected with the trade of the Red Sea as it was carried on in ancient times, and may again be resumed, and as of this I have treated professedly, I have preferred these, as having a classical foundation, to many others more curious and less known. Engraving in England has advanced rapidly towards perfection, and the prices, as we may suppose, have kept proportion with the improvement. My small fortune, already impaired with the expence of the journey, will not, without doing injustice to my family, bear the additional one, of publishing these numerous articles, which, however desirable it might be, would amount to a sum which in me it would not be thought prudent to venture.

Even many of those that the necessities of particular times have brought thither to supply wants with which they could not dispense, and those which curious hands have brought from foreign countries are not planted at random; for they would not grow in Egypt, but in chosen places formerly artificially raised above level, for gardens, and pleasure ground, where they are at this day watered by machinery; or upon banks above the calishes, which though near the water, are yet above the level of its annual inundation. Such is the garden of Mattareah, sometimes filled with exotic plants from all the countries around, from the veneration or superstition, pilgrims and dervishies, the only travellers of the east, have for that spot, the supposed abode of the Virgin Mary when she fled into Egypt, sometimes, as at present, so neglected as to have scarce one foreign or curious plant in it.

This last property, I suppose, is purely imaginary, for though it be true, tradition says, that all the mummy-chests, which have been found from former ages, were made of sycamore, though the same is the persuasion of latter times, and the fact is so far proven by all the mummy-chests now found being of that wood, yet I will not take upon me to vouch, that incorruptibility is a quality of this particular tree. I believe that seasoned elm, oak, or ash, perhaps even fir, laid in the dry sands of Egypt perfectly screened from moisture, and defended from the outward air, as all mummy-chests are, would likewise appear incorruptible; and my reason is, that having got made, while at Cairo, a case for a telescope of sycamore plank, I buried it in my garden after I came home from my travels, so as to leave it covered by half a foot of earth; in less than four years it was entirely putrid and rotten. And another telescope case of the cedar of Lebanon appeared much less decayed, though even in this last there were evident signs of corruption. But even suppose it true, that these planks have been found incorruptible, a doubt may still arise, whether they do not owe this quality to a kind of varnish of resinous materials with which I have seen almost all the mummy-chests covered, and to which materials the preservation of the mummy itself is in part certainly owing. The sycamore is a native of that low warm stripe of country between the Red Sea and mountains of Abyssinia; we saw a number of very fine ones before we came to Taranta; they are also in Syria about Sidon, but inferior in size to the former; they do not seem to thrive in Arabia, for want of moisture.

All the other vegetable productions of Egypt have been in a fluctuating state from one year to another. We find them in Prosper Alpinus, and by his authority we seek for them in that country. In Egypt we find them no more; through neglect, they are rotten and gone, but we meet them flourishing in Nubia, Abyssinia, and Arabia Felix, and these are the countries whence the curious first brought them, and from which, by some accident similar to the first, they may again appear in Egypt.

Prosper Alpinus's work then, so far from being a collection of plants and trees of Egypt, may be said to be a treatise of plants that are not in Egypt, but by accident; they are gleanings of natural history from Syria, Arabia, Nubia, Abyssinia, Persia, Malabar, and Indostan, of which, as far as I could discern or discover, seven species only remained when I was in Egypt, mostly trees of such a growth as to be out of the power of every thing but the ax.

The plant that I shall now speak of, the Papyrus, is a strong proof of this, and is a remarkable instance of the violent changes these subjects have undergone in a few ages. It was at the first the repository of learning and of record; it was the vehicle of knowledge from one nation to another; its uses were so extended, that it came to be even the food of man, and yet we are now disputing what this plant was, and what was its figure, and whether or not it is to be found in Egypt.

A gentleman at the head of the literary world, who from his early years has dedicated himself to the study of the theory of this science, and at a riper age has travelled through the world in the more agreeable pursuit of the practical part of it, hath assured me, that, unless from bad drawings, he never had an idea of what this plant was till I first gave him a very fine specimen. The Count de Caylus says, that having heard there was a specimen of this plant in Paris, he used his utmost endeavours to find it, but when brought to him, it appeared to be a cyperus of a very common, well-known kind. With my own hands, not without some labour and risk, I collected specimens from Syria, from the river Jordan, from two different places in Upper and Lower Egypt, from the lakes Tzana and Gooderoo in Abyssinia; and it was with the utmost pleasure I found they were in every particular intrinsically the same, without any variation or difference, from what this plant has been described by the ancients; only I thought that those of Egypt, the middle of the two extremes, were stronger, fairer, and fully a foot taller than those in Syria and Abyssinia.

OF PLANTS, SHRUBS, AND TREES.

PAPYRUS.

The papyrus is a cyperus, called by the Greeks Biblus. There is no doubt but it was early known in Egypt, since we learn from Horus Apollo, the Egyptians, wishing to describe the antiquity of their origin, figured a faggot, or bundle of papyrus, as an emblem of the food they first subsisted on, when the use of wheat was not yet known in that country. But I should rather apprehend that another plant, hereafter described, and not the papyrus, was what was substituted for wheat, for though the Egyptians sucked the honey or sweetness from the root of the papyrus, it does not appear that any part of this cyperus could be used for food, nor is it so at this day, though the Ensete, the plant to which I allude, might, without difficulty, have been used for bread in early ages before the discovery of wheat; in several provinces it holds its place at this day.

Early, however, as the papyrus was known, it does not appear to me to have ever been a plant that could have existed in, or, as authors have said, been proper to the river Nile; its head is too heavy, and in a plain country the wind must have had too violent a hold of it. The stalk is small and feeble, and withal too tall, the root too short and slender to stay it against the violent pressure of the wind and current, therefore I do constantly believe it never could be a plant growing in the river Nile itself, or in any very deep or rapid river.

Pliny, who seems to have considered and known it perfectly in all its parts, does not pretend that it ever grew in the body of the Nile itself, but in the calishes or places where the Nile had overflowed and was stagnant, and where the water was not above two cubits high. This observation, I believe, holds good universally, at least it did so wherever I have seen this plant, either in the overflowed ground in the Seide, or Upper Egypt, or in Abyssinia where it never grew in the bed of a river, but generally in some small stream that issued out of, or into some large stagnant lake or abandoned water-course. It did not even trust itself to the weight of the wave of the deepest part of that lake when agitated by the wind, but it grew generally about the borders of it, as far as the depth of the water was within a yard.

Pliny says it grew likewise in Syria, and there I saw it first, before I went into Egypt; it was in the river Jordan, between the situation of the ancient city Paneas, which still bears its name, and the lake of Tiberias, which is probably the lake Pliny alludes to, where he says it grew, and with it the calamus odoratus, one of the adventitious plants brought thither formerly by curious men which now exists no more, either in Syria or Egypt. It was on the left hand of the bridge called the Bridge of the Sons of Jacob. The river where it grew was two feet nine inches deep, and it was then increased with rain. It grew likewise, as Guilandinus tells us, at the confluence of the Tigris and the Euphrates. I apprehend that it was not thus propagated into Asia and Greece till the use of it, as manufactured into paper, was first known.

When that was still admits of some difficulty. Pliny says that Varro writes it came not into general use till after the conquest of Egypt by Alexander; yet it is plain from Anacreon, Alcaeus, AEschylus, and the comic poets, that it was known in their time. Plato and Aristotle speak of it also, so do Herodotus and Theophrastus. We also know it was of old in use among the Ionians, who probably brought it in very early days directly from Egypt. Numa, too, who lived 300 years before Alexander, is said to have left a number of books wrote on the papyrus, which a long time after his death were found at Rome.

All this might very well be; the writers of those early ages were but few, and those that then were, had all of them, more or less, connection by their learning with Egypt; it was to them only Egypt was known, and if they learned to write there, it was not improbable, that from thence too they adopted the materials most commodious for writing upon.

With Aristotle began the first arrangement of a library. Alexander's conquest, and the building of Alexandria, laid open Egypt, its trade and learning, to the world. Papyrus then, or the paper made from it, was the only materials made use of for writing upon. A violent desire of amassing books, and a library, immediately followed, which we may safely attribute to the example set by Aristotle.

The ancients divided this plant into three parts, the head and the small part of the stalk were cut off, then the woody part, or bottom, and the root connected with it, and there remained the middle. All these had separate uses. Pliny says the upper part, which supported the large top itself, with the flowers upon it, was of no sort of use but to adorn the temples, and crown the statues of the gods; but it would seem that it was in use likewise for crowning men of merit. Plutarch says, that Agesilaus preferred being crowned with that to any other, on account of its simplicity, and that parting from the king he had sought to be crowned with this as a favour, which was granted him. Athenaeus, on the contrary, laughed at those that mixt roses in the crown of papyrus, and he says it is as ridiculous as mixing roses with a crown of garlic. The reason, however, he gives does not hold, for papyrus itself smells no more of mud, as he supposes, than a rose-bush; nay, the flower of the papyrus has something agreeable in its smell, though not so much so as roses. If he had said that the head of the papyrus resembled withered grass or hay, and made a bad contrast with the richness and beauty of the rose, he had said well. But notwithstanding what Pliny has written, the head of the papyrus was employed, not only to make crowns for statues of the gods, but also to make cables for ships. We are told that Antigonus made use of nothing else for ropes and cables to his fleets, before the use of spartum, or bent-grass, was known, which, though very little better, still serves that purpose in small ships on the coast of Provence to this day. The top of the papyrus was likewise used for sewing and caulking the vessels, by forcing it into the seams, and afterwards covering it with pitch.

Pliny tells us, that the whole plant together was used for making boats, a piece of the acacia tree being put in the bottom to serve as the keel, to which plants were joined, being first sewed together, then gathered up at stem and stern, and the ends of the plant tied fast there, "Conseritur bibula Memphitis cymba papyro;" and this is the only boat they still have in Abyssinia, which they call Tancoa, and from the use of these it is that Isaiah describes the nations, probably the Egyptians, upon whom the vengeance of God was speedily to fall. I imagine also that the junks of the Red Sea, said to be of leather, were first built with papyrus and covered with skins. In these the Homerites trafficked with their friends the Sabeans across the mouth of the Red Sea, but they can never persuade me, however generally and confidently it has been asserted, that vessels of this kind could have lived an hour upon the Indian ocean.

The bottom, root, or woody part of this plant, was likewise of several uses before it turned absolutely hard; it was chewed in the manner of liquorice, having a considerable quantity of sweet juice in it. This we learn from Dioscorides; it was, I suppose, chewed, and the sweetness sucked out in the same manner as is done with sugar-cane. This is still practised in Abyssinia, where they likewise chew the root of the Indian corn, and of every kind of cyperus; and Herodotus tells us, that about a cubit of the lower part of the stalk was cut off and roasted over the fire, and eaten.

From the scarcity of wood, which was very great in Egypt for the reasons I have already mentioned, this lower part was likewise used in making cups, moulds, and other necessary utensils; we need not doubt too, one use of the woody part of this plant was to serve for what we call boards or covers for binding the leaves, which were made of the bark; we know that this was anciently one use of it, both from Alcaeus and Anacreon.

The manner paper was made has been controverted; but whoever will read Pliny attentively, cannot, as I imagine, be long in doubt. The thick part of the stalk being cut in half, the pellicle between the pith and the bark, or perhaps the two pellicles, were stript off, and divided by an iron instrument, which probably was sharp-pointed, but did not cut at the edges. This was squared at the sides so as to be like a ribband, then laid upon a smooth table or dresser, after being cut into the length that it was required the leaf should be. These stripes, or ribbands of papyrus, were lapped over each other by a very thin border, and then pieces of the same kind were laid transversely, the length of these answering to the breadth of the first. The book which I have is eleven inches and a half long, and seven inches broad, and there is not one leaf in it that has a ribband of papyrus of two inches and a half broad, from which I imagine the size of this plant, formerly being fifteen feet long, was pretty near the truth. No such plant, however, appears now; I do not remember to have ever seen one more than ten feet high. This is probably owing to their being allowed to grow wild, and too thick together, without being weeded; we know from Herodotus, that the Egyptians cut theirs down yearly as they did their harvest.

These ribbands, or stripes of papyrus, have twelve different names in Pliny, which is to be copious with a vengeance. They are, philura, ramentum; scheda, cutis, plagula, corium, taenia, subtegmen, statumen, pagina, tabula, and papyrus. After these, by whatever name you call them, were arranged at right angles to each other, a weight was placed upon them while moist, which compressed them, and so they were suffered to dry in the sun.

It was supposed that the water of the Nile had a gummy quality necessary to glue these stripes together. This we may be assured is without foundation, no such quality being found in the water of the Nile. On the contrary, I found it of all others the most improper, till it had settled, and was absolutely divested of all the earth gathered in its turbid state. I made several pieces of this paper, both in Abyssinia and Egypt, and it appears to me, that the sugar or sweetness with which the whole juice of this plant is impregnated, is the matter that causes the adhesion of these stripes together, and that the use of the water is no more than to dissolve this, and put it perfectly and equally in fusion.

There seemed to be an advantage in putting the inside of the pellicle in the situation that it was before divided, that is, the interior parts face to face, one long-ways, and one cross-ways, after which a thin board of the cover of a book was laid first over it, and a heap of stones piled upon it. I do not think it succeeded with boiled water, and it was always coarse and gritty with the water of the Nile. Some pieces were excellent, made with water that had settled, that is, in the state in which we drink it; but even the best of it was always thick and heavy, drying very soon, then turning firm and rigid, and never white; nor did I ever find one piece that would bear the strokes of a mallet, but in its greenest state the blow shivered and divided the fibres length-ways; nor did I see the marks of any stroke of a hammer or mallet in the book in my custody, which is certainly on Saitic or Hieratic paper. I apprehend by a passage in Pliny, that the mallet was used only when artificial glue or gum was made use of, which must have been as often as they let these stripes of the ribband or pellicle dry before arranging them.

Pliny says, the books of Numa were 830 years old when they were found, and he wonders, from the brittleness of the inside of the paper, it could have lasted so long. The manuscript in my possession, which was dug up at Thebes, I conjecture is near three times the age that Pliny mentions; and, though it is certainly fragil, has substance and preservation of letter enough, with good care, to last as much longer, and be legible.

If the Saitic paper was, as we imagine, the first invented, it should follow, contrary to what Isidore advances, that it was not first invented in Memphis, but in Upper Egypt in Seide, whose language and writing obtained in the earliest age, though Lucan seems to think with Isidore,

LUCAN, lib. iii.

After the hieroglyphics were lost, perhaps some time before, we know nothing the Egyptians adopted so generally as paper, and there were probably religious reasons that impeded in those early days the people from falling upon the most natural, the skins of beasts. However this be, it is certain under the Egyptians, naturally averse to novelty and improvement, paper arrived to no great perfection till taken in hands by the Romans. The Charta Claudia was thirteen inches wide, the Hieratica, or Saitica, eleven, and such is the length of the leaf of my book in the Saitic dialect, that is, the old Coptic, or Egyptian of Upper Egypt. I have no idea what the Emporetic paper was, which obtained that degree of coarseness and toughness, as to serve for shopkeepers' uses to tie up goods, unless it was like our brown paper employed to the same purposes.

If the date of the invention of this useful art of making paper is doubtful, the time when it was lost, or superseded by one more convenient, is as uncertain. Eustathius says it was disused in his time in the 1170. Mabillon endeavours to prove it existed in the 9th, and even that there existed some Popish bulls wrote upon it as late as the 11th century. He gives, as instances, a part of St Mark's Gospel preserved at Venice as being upon papyrus, and the fragment of Josephus at Milan to be cotton paper, while Maffei proves this to be just the reverse, that of St Mark being cotton, and the other indisputably he thinks to be Egyptian papyrus, so that Mabillon's authority as to the bulls of the pope may be fairly questioned.

The several times I have been at these places mentioned, I have never succeeded in seeing any of these pieces; that of St Mark at Venice I was assured had been recognized to be cotton paper; it was rendered not legible by the warm saliva of zealots kissing it from devotion, which I can easily comprehend must contain a very corrosive quality, and the Venetians now refuse to shew it more. I have seen two detached leaves of papyrus, but do not believe there is another book existing at the present time but that in my possession, which is very perfect. I gave Dr Woide leave to translate it at Lord North's desire; it is a gnostic book, full of their dreams.

The general figure of this plant Pliny has rightly said to resemble a Thyrsus; the head is composed of a number of small grassy filaments, each about a foot long. About the middle, each of these filaments parts into four, and in the point, or partition, are four branches of flowers; the head of this is not unlike an ear of wheat in form, but which in fact is but a chaffy, silky, soft husk. These heads, or flowers, grow upon the stalk alternately, and are not opposite to, or on the same line with each other at the bottom.

Pliny says it has no seed; but this we may be assured is an absurdity. The form of the flower sufficiently indicates that it was made to resolve itself into the covering of one, which is certainly very small, and by its exalted situation, and thickness of the head of the flower, seems to have needed the extraordinary covering it has had to protect it from the violent hold the wind must have had upon it. For the same reason, the bottom of the filaments composing the head are sheathed in four concave leaves, which keep them close together, and prevent injury from the wind getting in between them.

The stalk is of a vivid green, thickest at the bottom, and tapering up to the top; it is of a triangular form. In the Jordan, the single side, or apex of the triangle, stood opposed to the stream as the cut-water of a boat or ship, or the sharp angle of a buttress of a bridge, by which the pressure of the stream upon the stalk would be greatly diminished. I do not precisely remember how it stood in the lakes in Ethiopia and Egypt, and only have this remark in the notes I made at the Jordan.

This construction of the stalk of the papyrus seems to reproach Aristotle with want of observation. He says that no plant had either triangular or quadrangular stalks. Here we see an instance of the contrary in the papyrus, whose stalk is certainly and universally triangular; and we learn from Dioscorides that many more have quadrangular stalks, or stems of four angles.

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