Part 6

At the same time that I was taking these pains about the myrrh, I had desired the savages to bring me all the gums they could find, with the branches and bark of the trees that produced them. They brought me at different times some very fine pieces of incense, and at another time a very small quantity of a bright colourless gum, sweeter on burning than incense, but no branches of either tree, though I found this latter afterwards in another part of Abyssinia. But at all times they procured me quantities of gum of an even and close grain, and of a dark brown colour, which was produced by a tree called Sassa, and twice I received branches of this tree in tolerable order, and of these I made a drawing.

Some weeks after, while walking at Emfras, a Mahometan village, whose inhabitants are myrrh merchants, I saw a large tree with the whole upper part of the trunk, and the large branches, so covered with bosses and knobs of gum, as to appear monstrously deformed, and inquiring farther about this tree, I found that it had been brought, many years before, from the myrrh country, by merchants, and planted there for the sake of its gum, with which these Mahometans stiffened the blue Surat cloths they got damaged from Mocha, to trade in with the Galla and Abyssinians. Neither the origin of the tree which they called Sassa, nor the gum, could allow me to doubt a moment that it was the same as what had been brought to me from the myrrh country, but I had the additional satisfaction to find the tree all covered over with beautiful crimson flowers of a very extraordinary and strange construction. I began then a drawing anew, with all that satisfaction known only to those who have been conversant in such discoveries.

London Publish’d Dec.^r 1.^{st} 1789 by G. Robinson & Co.]

London Publish’d Dec.^r 1.^{st} 1789 by G. Robinson & Co.]

I took pieces of the gum with me; it is very light. Galen complains that, in his time, the myrrh was often mixed with a drug which he calls Opocalpasum, by a Greek name, but what the drug was is totally unknown to us at this day, as nothing similar to the Greek name is found in the language of the country. But as the only view of the savage, in mixing another gum with his myrrh, must have been to increase the quantity, and as the great plenty in which this gum is produced, and its colour, make it very proper for this use, and above all, as there is no reason to think there is another gum-bearing tree of equal qualities in the country where the myrrh grows, it seems to me next to a proof, that this must have been the opocalpasum of Galen.

I must however confess, that Galen says the opocalpasum was so far from being an innocent drug, that it was a mortal poison, and had produced very fatal effects. But as those Troglodytes, though now more ignorant than formerly, are still well acquainted with the properties of their herbs and trees, it is not possible that the savage, desiring to increase his sales, would mix them with a poison that must needs diminish them. And we may therefore without scruple suppose that Galen was mistaken in the quality ascribed to this drug, and that he might have imagined, from tenderness to the profession, that people died of the opocalpasum who perhaps really died of the physician: First, Because we know of no gum or resin that is a mortal poison: Secondly, Because, from the construction of its parts, gum could not have the activity which violent poison has; and considering the small quantities in which myrrh is taken, and the opocalpasum could have been but in an inconsiderable proportion to the myrrh, to have killed, it must have been a very active poison indeed: Thirdly, these accidents from a known cause must have brought myrrh into disuse, as certainly as the Spaniards mixing arsenic with bark would banish that drug when we saw people die of it. Now this never was the case, it maintained its character among the Greeks and the Arabs, and so down to our days; and a modern physician, Van Helmont, thinks it might make man immortal if it could be rendered perfectly soluble in the human body. Galen then was mistaken as to the poisonous quality of the opocalpasum. The Greek physician knew little of the Natural History of Arabia, less still of that of Abyssinia, and we who have followed them know nothing of either.

This gum being put into water, swells and turns white, and loses all its glue; it very much resembles gum adragant in quality, and may be eaten safely. This specimen came from the Troglodyte country in the year 1771. The Sassa, the tree which produces the opocalpasum, does not grow in Arabia. Arabian myrrh is easily known from Abyssinian by the following method: Take a handful of the smallest pieces found at the bottom of the basket where the myrrh was packed, and throw them into a plate, and just cover them with water a little warm, the myrrh will remain for some time without visible alteration, for it dissolves slowly, but the gum will swell to five times its original size, and appear so many white spots amidst the myrrh.

Emfras, as I have said, is a large village something more than twenty miles south from Gondar, situated upon the face of a hill of considerable height above the lake Tzana, of which, and all its islands, it has a very distinct and pleasant view; it is divided from the lake by a large plain, near which is the island of Mitraha, one of the burying-places of the kings. The inhabitants of the lower town, close on the banks of the small river Arno, are all Mahometans, many of them men of substance, part of them the king’s tent-makers, who follow the camp, and pitch his tents in the field; the others are merchants to the myrrh and frankincense country, that is, from the east parallel of the kingdom of Dancali to the point Cape Gardefan, or Promontorium Aromatum; they also bring salt from the plains, on the west of the kingdom of Dancali, where fossile salt is dug; it is on the S. E. border of the kingdom of Tigré. These Mahometans trade also to the Galla, to the westward of the Nile; their principal commodity is myrrh and damaged cargoes of blue Surat cloth, which they unfold and clean, then stiffen them with gum, and fold them in form of a book as when they were new.

This gum, which is called Sassa, they at first brought from the myrrh country behind Azab, till ingenious and sagacious people had carried plants of the tree to their different villages, where they have it growing in great perfection, and more than supply the uses of the merchants.

This tree grows to a great height, not inferior to that of an English elm; that from which this draught was made was about two feet diameter; the gum grows on all sides of the trunk, in quantity enough almost to cover it, in form of large globes, and so it does on all the principal branches. These lumps are sometimes so large as to weigh two pound, though naturally very light.

The bark of the tree is thin and of a bluish colour, not unlike that of a cherry-tree when young, or rather whiter. The wood is white and hard, only the young branches which carry the flower are red. The leaves are joined to the sides of the small branches by a small pedicle of considerable strength, the leaves are two and two, or opposite to each other, and have no single leaf at the point; they are strongly varnished both on one side and the other, the back rather lighter than the foreside of the leaf. The branches that carry the leaves have about an inch of the stalk bare, where it is fixed to the larger branch. There are generally fourteen leaves, each of about three quarters of an inch long. At the top of the branch are knots out of which come three small stalks, bare for about an inch and a half, then having a number of small tubes, which, when they open at the top, put forth a long pistil from the bottom of the tube. The top of the tube, divided into five segments, or petals, arrives about one third up the pistil, and makes the figure of a calix or perianthium to it. From this tube proceeds a great number of very small capillaments of a pink colour, at the end of each of which hangs a purple stigma. At the top of this pistil is a large bunch of still finer fibres, or capillaments, with stigmata likewise, and at the end the pistil is rounded as if forming a fruit; without a very distinct drawing, it would be difficult to make a description that should be intelligible.

Nothing can be more beautiful, or more compounded, than the formation of this flower, though it has no odour; the head is composed of about thirty of these small branches now described, which make a very beautiful mass, and is of a pink colour of different shades. At sun-set, the leaves on each side of the branch shut face to face like the sensitive tribe. I never saw any seed or fruit that it bore, nor any thing like the rudiments of seed, unless it be that very small rotundity that appears at the end of the pistil, which seem to bear no proportion to so large a tree.

ERGETT Y’DIMMO.

The two beautiful shrubs which I have here given to the reader are called by the name of Ergett, which we may suppose, in Abyssinian botany, to be the generic name of the mimosa, as both of these have the same name, and both of the same family, of which there are many varieties in Abyssinia.

This first is called the Bloody Ergett, as we may suppose from the pink filaments of which this beautiful and uncommon flower is in part composed, and which we may therefore call Mimosa Sanguinea. The upper part of the flower is composed of curled, yellow filaments, and the bottom a pink of the same structure. I never saw it in any other state. Before the blossoms spread it appears in the form here exhibited. The pink, or lower part, in its unripe state, is composed of green tubercules, larger and more detached than where the yellow flower is produced, whose tubercules are smaller and closer set together. I need not say the leaves are of the double pinnated kind, as that and every thing else material can be learned from the figure, full as perfectly as if the flower was before them; none of the parts, however trifling and small, being neglected in the representation, and none of them supposed or placed there out of order, for ornament, or any other cause whatever: a rule which I would have the reader be persuaded is invariably observed in every article represented in this collection, whether tree or plant, beast, bird, or fish.

London Publish’d Dec.^r 1.^{st} 1789 by G. Robinson & Co.]

London Published Decem.^r 1.^{st} 1789 by G. Robinson & Co.]

ERGETT EL KRONE.

The next of this species of Ergett or Mimosa, is called in Abyssinia Ergett el Krone, or the Horned Ergett; I apprehend the figure of the pods have given it that appellation. Its flower in size and form very much resembles the acacia vera, only that it is attached to the branch by a long and strong woody stalk, which grows out at the bottom of the branch bearing the leaves, and is sheltered as in a case by the lower part of it. The branches of it are all covered with very short, strong, sharp-pointed thorns, whose point is inclined backward towards the root. Its pods are covered with a prickly kind of hair, which, when touched, stick in your fingers and give very uneasy sensations. The pods are divided into thirteen divisions, in each of which are three round seeds, hard and shining, of a dusky brownish colour. The flower has scarcely any smell, nor do I know that it is of any utility whatever. Both these beautiful shrubs were found upon the banks of the river Arno, between Emfras and the lake Tzana. The soil is black mould, with a great mixture or composition of rotten putrified leaves, thinly covering the rock in the temperate part of Abyssinia. What I have to observe of both these shrubs is, that they shut their leaves upon the violent rains of winter, and are never fully expanded till the sun and fair season again return.

ENSETE.

The Ensete is an herbaceous plant. It is said to be a native of Narea, and to grow in the great swamps and marshes in that country, formed by many rivers rising there, which have little level to run to either ocean. It is said that the Galla, when transplanted into Abyssinia, brought for their particular use the coffee-tree, and the Ensete, the use of neither of which were before known. However, the general opinion is, that both are naturally produced in every part of Abyssinia, provided there is heat and moisture. It grows and comes to great perfection at Gondar, but it most abounds in that part of Maitsha and Goutto west of the Nile, where there are large plantations of it, and is there almost, exclusive of any thing else, the food of the Galla inhabiting that province; Maitsha is nearly upon a dead level, and the rains have not slope to get off easily, but stagnate and prevent the sowing of grain. Vegetable food would therefore be very scarce in Maitsha, were it not for this plant.

Heath. Sc.

London Publish’d Dec.^r 1.^{st} 1789 by G. Robinson & Co.]

Heath. Sc.

London Published Dec.^r 1.^{st} 1789 by G. Robinson & Co.]

Some who have seen my drawing of this plant, and at the same time found the banana in many parts of the east, have thought the Ensete to be a species of the Musa. This however, I imagine, is without any sort of reason. It is true, the leaf of the banana resembles that of the Ensete, it bears figs, and has an excrescence from its trunk, which is terminated by a conical figure, chiefly differing from the Ensete in size and quantity of parts, but the figs of the banana are in shape of a cucumber, and this is the part which is eaten. This fig is sweet though mealy, and of a taste highly agreeable. It is supposed to have no seeds, though in fact there are four small black seeds in every fig belonging to it. But the figs of the Ensete are not eatable; they are of a tender, soft substance; watery, tasteless, and in colour and consistence similar to a rotten apricot; they are of a conical form, crooked a little at the lower end, about an inch and a half in length, and an inch in breadth where thickest. In the inside of these is a large stone half an inch long, of the shape of a bean or cushoo-nut, of a dark brown colour, and this contains a small seed, which is seldom hardened into fruit, but consists only of skin.

The long stalk that bears the figs of the Ensete springs from the center of the plant, or rather is the body or solid part of the plant itself. Upon this, where it begins to bend, are a parcel of loose leaves, then grows the fig upon the body of the plant without any stalk, after which the top of the stalk is thick-set with small leaves, in the midst of which it terminates the flower in form of the artichoke; whereas in the banana, the flower, in form of the artichoke, grows at the end of that shoot, or stalk, which proceeds from the middle of the plant, the upper part of which bears the row of figs.

The leaves of the Ensete are a web of longitudinal fibres closely set together; the leaves grow from the bottom, and are without stalks; whereas the banana is in shape like a tree, and has been mistaken for such. One half of it is divided into a stem, the other is a head formed of leaves, and, in place of the stem that grows out of the Ensete, a number of leaves rolled together round like a truncheon, shoots out of the heart of the banana, and renews the upper as the under leaves fall off; but all the leaves of the banana have a long stalk; this fixes them to the trunk, which they do not embrace by a broad base, or involucrum, as the Ensete does.