previous next

CHAP. 12. (6.)—THE TEREBINTH.1

Syria, too, produces the terebinth, the male tree of which bears no fruit, and the female consists of two different varieties;2 one of these bears a red fruit, the size of a lentil, while the other is pale, and ripens at the same period as the grape. This fruit is not larger than a bean, is of a very agreeable smell, and sticky and resinous to the touch. About Ida in Troas, and in Macedonia, this tree is short and shrubby, but at Damascus, in Syria, it is found of very considerable size. Its wood is remarkably flexible, and continues sound to a very advanced age: it is black and shining. The blossoms appear in clusters, like those of the olive-tree, but are of a red colour; the leaves are dense, and closely packed. It produces follicules, too, from which issue certain insects like gnats, as also a kind of resinous liquid3 which oozes from the bark.

1 Pistacia terebinthus of Linnæus.

2 These varieties, Fée says, are not observed by modern naturalists.

3 Garidel has remarked, that the trunk of this tree produces coriaceous vesicles, filled with a clear and odoriferous terebinthine, in which pucerons, or aphides, are to be seen floating.

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.

An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.

load focus Latin (Karl Friedrich Theodor Mayhoff, 1906)
hide Places (automatically extracted)

View a map of the most frequently mentioned places in this document.

hide References (3 total)
hide Display Preferences
Greek Display:
Arabic Display:
View by Default:
Browse Bar: