Author: Aylmer Bourke Lambert

Publisher: Theclassics.Us

Published: 2013-09

Total Pages: 42

ISBN-13: 9781230365183

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1832 edition. Excerpt: ... SOME ACCOUNT OF THE MEDICINAL AND OTHER USES OF VARIOUS SUBSTANCES PBEPAEED FROM TREES OF THE GENUS PINUS. Most species of Pinus may be made to yield (and many of them produce spontaneously) a remarkable resinous juice, usually called Turpentine. This appellation more properly belongs to the product of a different genus, called by Linnaeus Pistachia, which contains the tree Terebinthus* of the ancients. The juice of Pines, however, like that of the Turpentine trees, has an austere, astringent taste, singular viscosity and transparency, ready inflammability, and a disposition to become more or less concrete. In distillation with water, it yields a highly penetrating essential oil, and the liquor is found to be impregnated with an acid, a brittle resinous matter remaining behind. Digestion with rectified spirit of wine completely dissolves all the resinous part, along with which some portion jof the insipid gum, or mucilage, is also taken up. If this solution be DEGREESfiltered, and diluted largely with water, it becomes turbid, and throws off the greatest part of the oil, the gummy substance being retained. If the solution be subjected to distillation, the spirit brings over with it some of the lighter oil, so as to be sensibly impregnated with its terebinthinate odour, and it leaves behind an extract differing from the resin separated by water, in having an admixture of mucilage. The native juice becomes miscible with water, by the mediation of the yolk or the white of an egg, but more elegantly by that of vegetable The 1tpiuv9os of Theophrastus, (lib. 3. c. 3, ) and Dioscorides, (lib. 1. cap. 76, ) from which the word Terebinthus seems to have been derived. Pistachia Terebinthus yields the resinous juice called in the shops Cyprus