ALGUM, OR ALMUG. Thuya articulata,- Algum, Almug, or Thyine Tree. Linnæan class and order, MoNCIA MONADELPHIA. B ALGUM, OR ALMUG. 1 Kings, v. 6. 2 Chron. ii. 8.; ix. 10, 11. Revelation, xviii. 12. A CONIFEROUS tree, growing in the North of Africa, may lay claim to being the Almug of the Old Testament, the Thyine tree of the Revelation. The cut I have given is from Desfontaine's Atlantica. He says it says it grows in arid land, and attains to the height of sixteen feet. Vahl talks of it as a shrub of six feet high; but Schaw, in his account of African trees, says that it is something between a tree and a shrub. The tree is called ARAR by Schousboe, who resided some years in Mauritania, and is shown by him to be the Thuya articulata. His description tallies exactly with that given of it by Vahl, Schaw, and other travellers. He says that the usual size was from twenty to twenty-four feet in height, and a foot or a foot and a half in diameter. * This agrees exactly with Des * See Schousboe's paper on the true origin of the resin known by the name of Sandarach, in the Bulletin de la Société Philomathique, No. 31. fontaines, who saw the trees among the mountains near Algiers, but he says Broussonet assured him that he had seen larger in Morocco. The difference difference of in size may probably be owing to the soil in the places where they grow. An English officer, belonging to the Duke of Wellington's army in Spain, having occasion to be on the western side of the lower range of Mount Atlas in search of a particular breed of horses, observed that the pines* of the forests on the mountain were not only diminutive in size, but singularly contorted; perhaps either the aridity of the soil, or the prevalence of certain winds, or both together, might have produced these dwarfish forests.† The Algum was one of the costly materials furnished by Hiram, King of Tyre, to Solomon, for the building of the Temple of Jerusalem; and also for * Pinus halepensis. † I have seen a specimen of the wood of the Thuya articulata cut longitudinally; it is dark nut-brown, close-grained, and very fragrant. Another specimen sent home to the Admiralty, with a branch of the tree attached to it, proves it to be the Thuya articulata. Another section of a wood, thought till lately to be a larger Thuya, was shown me. This has also been sent to the Admiralty as a specimen of African timber, together with a small branch showing it to be a species of Larch. The native name is El Aris, or El Areez. his own magnificent palaces, particularly the house. of Mount Lebanon. The cargo of Algum trees brought to Solomon while the Queen of Sheba was at Jerusalem, is said to have exceeded all that had been seen before in that city, or that was ever imported afterwards. Pillars to ornament the magnificent terraces of the temple and the palace were formed of it; but a part was reserved for the making of harps and psalteries for the king's singers. Thus the whole was dedicated to pious or to regal uses. Nor had it sunk in estimation when St. John wrote the Apocalypse, for he names it as one of the precious things that shall no longer attract the merchants of the earth to fallen Babylon. In the sixteenth chapter of the thirteenth book of Pliny's Natural History, he says that the Thyine trees grew in the neighbourhood of the temple of Jupiter Ammon, and also in the Cyrenaic province; and that Theophrastus* recommends the timber for temples, and such buildings as should be almost everlasting. In the preceding chapter he gives an account of the precious citron or citrine tables, which the most *Theophrastus wrote A.U.c. 440. |