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There is still extant a long but imperfect catalogue of eastern commodities, which about the time of Alexander Severus were subject to the payment of duties; cinnamon, myrrh, pepper, ginger, and the whole tribe of aromatics a great variety of precious stones, among which the diamond was the most remarkable for its price, and the emerald for its beauty; Parthian and Babylonian leather, cottons, silks, both raw and manufactured, ebony ivory, and eunuchs.
But let us peep into the 19th edition of the United States Dispensatory. Can this be the same fennel which "is one of our most grateful aromatics," and which, because of "the absence of any highly excitant property," is recommended for mixing with unpleasant medicines?
He had recognised the influence of Rabbet, being skilful to discern the gods who send diseases; and to cure Salammbo he had her apartment watered with lotions of vervain, and maidenhair; she ate mandrakes every morning; she slept with her head on a cushion filled with aromatics blended by the pontiffs; he had even employed baaras, a fiery-coloured root which drives back fatal geniuses into the North; lastly, turning towards the polar star, he murmured thrice the mysterious name of Tanith; but Salammbo still suffered and her anguish deepened.
The workman with leathern apparel walks through the field and the exudation of the plants adheres to the leathern garments, and then the man comes out and scrapes off this exudation, and it is mixed with aromatics and becomes an intoxicant that has brutalized whole nations.
He handled this collection, formerly bought to please a mistress who swooned under the influence of certain aromatics and balms, a nervous, unbalanced woman who loved to steep the nipples of her breasts in perfumes, but who never really experienced a delicious and overwhelming ecstacy save when her head was scraped with a comb or when she could inhale, amid caresses, the odor of perspiration, or the plaster of unfinished houses on rainy days, or of dust splashed by huge drops of rain during summer storms.
Verrazzano could not have been deceived and have mistaken some other sheet of water for this great sea, and so represented it on any chart, or communicated it in any other way to the maker of this map; for he makes no mention of the circumstance in his letter to the king to whom he would have been prompt to report so important a fact; as it would have proved the accomplishment of the object of his voyage, the discovery of a passage through this region to Cathay, or if not a passage, at least a way, which could have been made available for reaching the land of spices and aromatics, by reason of its low grade, evident by one sea being seen from the other, and its short distance.
Among these, as time served, we sat down more voluptuously than the delicate physician could do amidst his stores of aromatics, and where we found an object of love we found also an assuagement." "If," says de Bury, "we would have amassed cups of gold and silver, excellent horses, or no mean sums of money, we could in those days have laid up abundance of wealth for ourselves.
Of this grand collection of aromatics, two plants, at last, come off victorious.
A single torch of aromatics flared and hissed beside the throne dais. Tremendous wainscoting covered the base of the walls, more than a foot above a man's height. It was massively carved with colossal sheaves of lotus-blooms and sword-like palm-leaves. Columns of great girth, bouquets of conventional stamens, ending in foliated capitals, supported by the lofty ceiling.
But as animal debility is owing to defect of stimulus, or to defect of irritability, as shewn above, the method of cure is easily deduced: when the vascular muscles are not excited into their due action by the natural stimuli, we should exhibit those medicines, which possess a still greater degree of stimulus; amongst these are the foetids, the volatiles, aromatics, bitters, metallic salts, opiates, wine, which indeed should be given in small doses, and frequently repeated.
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