[615] “In Crete there is a kind of prickly plant, which in the common Greek idiom is generally called _ascolimbros_. The ancient Latins called it also by a Greek name, _glycyrrhizon_, though different from _glycyrrhiza_ (liquorice). It grows everywhere spontaneously, has a yellow flower, and abounds with a milky juice. The roots and leaves are usually eaten before it shoots up into a stem. We saw it exposed for sale with other herbs in the market-place of Ravenna, and at Ancona, where the women who were digging it up, gave it the name of _riuci_. We saw it gathered also in the Campagna di Roma, where the inhabitants called it _spinaborda_. This is the plant which by the modern Greeks is named _ascolimbros_.”--Bellonii Observationes, lib. i. cap. 18. “In Crete it is called _ascolymbros_, and in Lemnos _scombrouolo_, that is _scombri carduus_. This thistle abounds with a milky juice, like succory, has a yellow flower, and is excellent eating; so that I know no root cultivated in gardens which can be compared to it in taste, the parsnip not even excepted.” [616] Theophrast. Hist. Plant. p. 620. The figure which Stapel gives, p. 621, is not of the _Scolymus hispanicus_, but of _Scolymus maculatus_. It is taken from Clusius, who has also a figure of the former. [617] “I considered the heads of these poor Greeks as so many living inscriptions, which preserve to us the names mentioned by Dioscorides and Theophrastus. Though liable to different variations, they will, doubtless, be more lasting than the hardest marble, because they are every day renewed, whereas marble is effaced or destroyed. Inscriptions of this kind will preserve, therefore, to future ages the names of several plants known to those skilful Greeks who lived in happier and more learned times.”--Voyage du Levant, i. p. 34. Compare with the above what Haller says in his Biblioth. Botan. i. p. 28. [618] Plin. lib. xxi. cap. 16. See Theophrast. lib. vi. cap. 4. Theoocritus, Idyll. x. 4, mentions a lamb wounded in the foot by a _cactus_. Tertullian names this plant among prickly weeds, together with the _rubus_, in the end of the second chapter of that unintelligible book De Pallio. De la Cerda, in his excellent edition of Opera Tertulliani, Lutetiæ Paris. 1624, 2 vols. fol. i. p. 13, reads _carecto_ instead of _cacto_; but Salmasius, in his edition of that work, p. 172, has sufficiently vindicated the latter. [619] Dioscorid. Alexipharm. cap. 33. [620] Theoph. p. 613. [621] The creeping branches were in particular called _cacti_, the upright stem _pternix_. [622] Theophrastus calls the bottom of the calyx περικάρπιον, a word which is still retained in botany. But he also says that the same part of the _cactus_ was called also σκαλία; from which is derived the _ascalia_ of Pliny. Galen calls it σπόνδυλον. [623] Theoph. This term is explained by Pliny, lib. xiii. c. 4:--“Dulcis medulla palmarum in cacumine, quod cerebrum appellant.”