Elamites

“ ELEMI. Resina Elemi; Elemi; F. Résine Elemi; G. Elemiharz.
Botanical Origin—The resin known in pharmacy as Elemi is derived from a tree growing in the Philippines, which Blanco, [586] a botanist of Manila, described in 1845 under the name of Icica Abilo, but which is completely unknown to the botanists of Europe. Blanco’s description is such that, if correct, the plant cannot be placed in either of the old genera Icica or Elaphrium, comprehended by Bentham and Hooker in that of Bursera, nor yet in the allied genus Canarium; in fact even the order to which it belongs is somewhat doubtful. ”

“ Elephas primigenius, Blum, or Mammoth.—The Elephant with elongated skull, concave forehead, very long alveolæ for the tusks, the lower jaw obtuse, the grinders broader, parallel, marked with closer bands, which we name the Fossil Elephant (Elephas primigenius, Blum.) , is the Mammoth of the Russians. Its bones are only found in the fossil state. No person has seen in a fresh state bones resembling those by which this species is peculiarly distinguished, nor have the bones of the two preceding species been seen in the fossil state. ”

“ Although we have before us some prisms of the acids several millimetres long, it has been found impossible to ascertain their crystallographic character, each of the prisms being formed of very intimately aggregated crystals. Elemic acid melts at 215° C.; its alcoholic solution decidedly reddens litmus. Elemate of potassium is a crystalline salt. [Pg 152]
The relations of the substances hitherto isolated from elemi may perhaps be given thus:—
Uses—Elemi is scarcely used in British medicine except in the form of an ointment, sometimes prescribed as a stimulating application to old wounds. ”

“ Hence Leprosy proceeding from inward Disorders, is call’d Elephantia or Elephantiasis, which is a cutaneous Disease, makes the Skin scurfy and rough, in Colour resembling that of an Animal, that in Bulk and Intelligence is superior to all four-footed Beasts. ”

“ Good has given as one of his characteristic symptoms of the genus elephantiasis, are all tersely, yet accurately described. Indeed, if Sauvages, Swediaur, Cullen, or any of our great nosologists of the last or present century, had been 80poets, I greatly doubt whether, with all their medical knowledge to boot, they could, in four fettered lines of rhyme, have described the Greek elephantiasis more faithfully and briefly than we have it described in the four first lines that I have just quoted from the Dunfermline schoolmaster of the fifteenth century. ”

“ In the medical writings of Aretæus, Aetius, and the later school of Greek physicians, the disease is described under the title of elephantiasis, for (says Aretæus) “it is disgusting to the sight, and terrible in all respects (est visu fœdus et in omnibus terribilis) , like the beast of the same name.”149 The Arabian medical authors applied the corresponding term of “Das Fil,” “elephant disease,” 57or elephantiasis, to an affection entirely different, and one apparently unknown to the Greek physicians, namely, the tumid, Barbadoes, or Cochin leg of modern pathologists. ”

“ The presentation of the ear of corn was regarded as a special, indeed the most important, feature of the Mysteries of Eleusis, and it was reserved for the final degree. Much has been made of this incident by many who can see no beauty in pre-Christian or non-Christian systems of religion, their comments being based mainly on a statement of Gregory Nazianus, who stands almost alone in discerning lewdness in the Eleusinian ceremonial. He says: "It is not in our religion that you will find a seduced Cora, a wandering Demeter, a Keleos, and a Triptolemus appearing with serpents ”

“ Let us for a moment recapitulate the preceding evidence, with regard to the nosological nature of the English and Scottish leprosy:—First, various authors who personally witnessed the leprosy of the middle ages upon the Continent of Europe, in describing it, have described a disease having all the most characteristic symptoms of Greek elephantiasis. ”

“ Elmo one enjoys not only the view towards the sea, but the wide, green plain sprinkled with houses and studded with small towns or villages, bounded on the one hand by Vesuvius, and shut in, in every other direction, by the nearer heights close upon Naples, or by the sublimer heights of the distant Apennines. We had the view from St. Elmo on a clear, breezy afternoon, in company with a Frenchman and his wife, come from Rome with his family after a two years' residence there—worth remembering for the pretty bondage the brusque, stern, thin father was under to the tiny, sickly looking boy. ”

“ The resin spontaneously exuded and collected from the trunks, is often opaque and white, grey, or yellowish, looking not unlike fragments of old mortar. The microscope shows it to be made up of minute acicular crystals. [621]
3. Mauritius Elemi—Fine specimens of this substance and of Colophonia Mauritiana DC. the tree affording it, were sent to one of us (H.) in 1855 by Mr. Emile Fleurot of Mauritius. The resin accords in its general characters with Manila elemi, like which it leaves after treatment with cold spirit of wine, an abundance of crystals resembling amyrin. ”

“ But how is Elymas, Ελυμας, the interpretation of the word μαγος, magician or sorcerer? Ans. Both names are Asiatic; but neither Hebrew nor Greek. I have already observed, in the note on [681] , that mogh in Persian means an idolater, a worshipper of fire, and sometimes what we term a magician. Elymas is from the Arabic ilm, knowledge, science, doctrine, art; from alama, he was wise, skilled, etc.; hence aleem or alymon, a doctor or learned man, and, with the Greek termination, ελυμας, Elymas, the interpretation of mogh, Greek μαγος, magos, a magician, a wise man, doctor, etc. ”

“ I shall only observe here, that in the jaw of this animal, like those of all others of a carnivorous nature, the roots or fangs are inserted into the mass of bone, which not only surrounds the roots, but divides one tooth from the other; whereas in the elephant the grinders occupy one large and uniform cavity, from which they are gradually protruded as they are required for the purpose of grinding. ”

“ Elephantiasis, a peculiar skin disease, accompanied with abnormal swelling; so called because the skin becomes hard and stiff like an elephant's hide; attacks the lower limbs and scrotum; is chiefly confined to India and other tropical countries.
Elephantine, a small island below the first cataract of the Nile; contains interesting monuments and ruins of the ancient Roman and Egyptian civilisations. ”

“ The tumid leg, das fil, or elephantiasis of the Arabians, is a disease perfectly different from the tuberculous face affection or elephantiasis of the Greeks.
Again, the term lepra, as used by the Greek physicians themselves, signifies morbid changes in the skin, marked by the presence of scales, and which changes in the skin have no relation whatever to either the Arabian or Greek elephantiasis; but the same term lepra, as used by the Arabic translators, was applied to designate the latter of these two affections, viz. the Arabic “Juzam,” or elephantiasis of the Greeks. ”

“ In Europe, the fact that the mammoth survived into the human period was proved some years ago by the discovery of human stone implements associated with mammoth bones in the river gravels of the Somme Valley, France, and in the Virgin Cave at Brixham, South [Pg 11] Devon, England; but more interesting still, was the discovery of prehistoric carvings of the great elephant, sketches from nature made by the "cave-men," and found in their subterranean dwellings along the river Dordogne in France, illustrations of which will be given in the following pages. ”

“ We must also be on our guard against supposing that when Pagan or Christian writers refer vaguely to “mysteria,” they always have the Eleusinian in their mind.
The questions that the critical analysis of all the evidence may hope to solve are mainly these: (a) What do we know or what can we infer concerning the personality of the deities to whom the Eleusinian mysteries were originally consecrated, and were new figures admitted at a later period? (b) When was the mystery taken over by Athens and opened to all Hellas, and what was the state-organization provided? ”

“ Fig. 181.—Tooth of the Mammoth.
In all ages, and in almost all countries, chance discoveries have [383] been made of fossil bones of elephants in the soil. Pliny has transmitted to us a tradition, recorded by the historian Theophrastus, who wrote 320 years before Jesus Christ, of the existence of bones of fossil ivory in the soil of Greece, that the bones were [384] sometimes transformed into stones. “These bones,” the historian gravely tells us, “were both black and white, and born of the earth.” ”

“ All the ancient authors agree, in saying that the Egyptians made use of various aromatics to embalm the dead; that they employed for the rich, myrrh, (the resin of a species of Mimosa,) aloes, (the extracto-resinous juice of the Aloe perfoliata,) canella, (bark of the Laurus cinamomum,) and the cassia lignea, (bark of the Laurus cassia;) and for the poor, the cedria, (the fluid resin of the Pinus cedrus,) bitumen, (Bitumen judaicum, derived from the Dead sea,) and natrum, (a mixture of the carbonate, sulphate, and muriate of soda.) ”

“ When the daughters of Celeus come to conduct her to Eleusis, they come as in a Greek frieze, full of energy and motion and waving lines, but with gold and colours upon it. Eleusis—coming—the coming of Demeter thither, as thus told in the Homeric hymn, is the central instance in Greek mythology of such divine appearances. "She leaves for a season the company of the gods and abides among men;" and men's merit is to receive her in spite of appearances. ”

“ Of its contemporaneous existence with man in Europe, we have evidence not only in the discovery of stone implements along with its remains, but a few years since a fragment of the tusk of a Mammoth was found in the cave of La Madelaine in the Dordogne, on which was a rude but faithful representation of this hairy Elephant, etched by means of the stone implement of some cave dweller of the period, when, together with the Reindeer and the Bear, it roamed over Southern France. ”

“ The term Enamel properly designates vitreous pastes, to which various colours are given by means of metallic oxides: they are either opaque or transparent, and are capable of being applied superficially to several substances, earthy or metallic, forming a decorative covering, or revêtement, as it is termed by French writers, of admirable brilliancy and durability. The rich blue and green colours which appear on the little figures of deities and on various ornaments discovered in Egypt, appear to be enamels ”

“ This identification of remains of the Mammoth in Spain is, as far as I know, the first authenticated instance of the kind, and therefore important in relation to the southern distribution of the species; for although the elephant-remains found in many parts of Europe have been referred to the latter, it is well known that teeth of Elephas antiquus, Elephas meridionalis, and the so-called Elephas armeniacus have been confounded with molars of the Mammoth. ”

“ In defining the genus elephantiasis, Dr. Good selects the second 56and third characters of Cullen as the most distinctive, and adds to these two others—viz. “ (1) eyes fierce and staring; (2) perspiration highly offensive.” In defining the first species of this genus (or the Greek elephantiasis of other authors) , he introduces as its three pathognomonic symptoms, the first and fourth characters of Cullen and a part of the second.148
Nomenclature of the Disease. ”

“ For no testaceous body can be formed without an inhabitant; nor does it appear to me, that any Belemnite was ever formed without an alveolus, or concamerated shell.
The conical cavity and its nucleus are always proportioned to the bulk of the Belemnite, but not to its length: some are four times longer in proportion to the alveolus than others. The apex of the conical cavity, where the alveolus is first formed, in some runs up about half the length of the whole Belemnite ”

“ CHAPTER V HERMIONE OF ELEUSIS A cluster of white stuccoed houses with a craggy hill behind, and before them a blue bay girt in by the rocky isle of Salamis—that is Eleusis-by-the-Sea. Eastward and westward spreads the teeming Thrasian plain, richest in Attica. Behind the plain the encircling mountain wall fades away into a purple haze. One can look southward toward Salamis; then to the left rises the rounded slope of brown Pœcilon sundering Eleusis from its greater neighbour, Athens. ”

“ Sometime while digging an excavation through the, rich, deep soil the old Willamette Sound has left us, some one may find the bones and large grinding teeth of the Mammoth elephant, and mingled with them may be human bones or human imple- ments of chipped flint and a fragment of carving, perhaps even a picture of the long-haired Mammoth drawn with flint upon a piece of ivory. ”

“ The Greek word Eleusis means advent, and commemorates the visit of Demeter while wandering in search of her daughter,—which reminds one of the Egyptian story of Isis. Moved by gratitude, Demeter bestowed upon the people of Eleusis the bread-grain and the mysteries. From this city the cult of these two deities spread over all Greece and most of Asia Minor, passed into Italy in modified form, and thus became widely accepted. The people built at Eleusis a temple in pure Doric style and a Mystic House in which the secret festivals were held. ”