THE CASTOR-OIL PLANT.
767
Hid
Sex . Syst. Monoecia, Monadelphia.
(Oleum e seminibus expressum, L. Expressed oil of the seeds, E. Oleum e seminibus, D .)
CaT| IST0RY ’—The cas t°r-oil plant was known in the most ancient times,ha a * U hound the seeds of it in some Egyptian sarcophagi, supposed tobeen at least 4000 years old (Diet. Univ. de Mat. Med. t. vi.)Hi! ] C ^ ler this is, as some persons imagine, the plant alluded to in thej e (Jonah, ch. iv. 6), and which in our translation is called the gourd,<liff nil0t I ,rcten( l 1° decide. The pious fathers, Jerom and Augustin,j^ ere d so much in their opinions as to what was the particular planta nt in the passage just referred to, that from words, we are told, theyReeded to blows! (Harris, Nat. Hist, of the Bible .)
^ot lG anc i ent Greeks were acquainted with the Ricinus , for both Ilero-m e Us . ( Euterpe, 94) and Hippocrates (De Nat. Mulieb. p. 573, ed. Fees.)( 1|b ntlon it; and the latter employed the root in medicine. Dioscoridesthe r! v ‘ ca P- ld4) calls it the Kin or Kporwv. It was termed Kporwy by>ts ' Jree b f b and Ricinus by the Romans, on account of the resemblance of^ds to a little insect bearing these names, which infests dogs andj® r animals, and whose common name in English is the tick.
Pan ° Tany - Gen. Char. — Flowers monoecious. Calyx three to five,e d, valvate. Petals none. Filaments numerous, unequally polyadel-fy°. Us > cells of the anther distinct, below the apex of the filament.
6 s ^ ort > stigmas tliree, deeply bipartite, oblong, coloured, feathery ;pfj r y globose, three-celled, with an ovule in each cell. Fruit generallyti rr) C capsular, tricoccous. Trees, shrubs, or herbaceous plants, some-] a ^ es becoming arborescent. Leaves alternate, stipulate, palmate, pel-ljj e ’ " itli glands at the apex of the petiole. Flowers in terminal panicles,flower male, the upper female ; all articulated with their peduncles,sometimes augmented by bi-glandular bracts ( Lindley).p - Char. — Leaves peltato-palmate; the lobes lanceolate, serrated.O herbaceous, pruinose. Stigmas tliree, bifid at the apex. Capsuleer ed with spines (Bot. Gall.)
The stems of plants growing in this country areround, greenish or reddish-brown, and blue prui-nose, and branched. Leaves on long round petioles,eight or ten-lobed. A large scutelliform gland onthe petiole, near its junction with the lamina.Filaments capillary, branched. Stigmas reddish.Capsules supported on stalks, which are somewhatlonger than the capsules themselves.
When cultivated in Great Britain, Ricinus com-munis is an annual, seldom exceeding three or fourfeet high ; but in other parts of the world it is saidto be perennial, arborescent, and to attain a heightof fifteen to twenty feet. Ur. Roxburgh (FI. Indica ,vol. iii. ]). 689) says, that in India several varietiesare cultivated, “ some of them growing to thesize of a pretty large tree, and of many years’v it in Spain with a branched
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Pic.. 1G3.
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lc ‘nus communis.
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