I received this the third day at dinner, but the flower (if there had been any) was rubbed off. The fruit was in several stages, and in great perfection. The drawing, and description from this [185]plant, will, I hope, for ever obviate all difficulty about its history. He sent me, likewise, a quart bottle of the pure balsam, as it had flowed that year from the tree, with which I have verified what the old botanists in their writings have said of it, in its several stages. He told me also the circumstances I have related in my description of the balsam, as to the gathering and preparing of the several kinds of it, and a curious anecdote as to its origin. He said the plant was no part of the creation of God in the six days, but that, in the last of three very bloody battles, which Mahomet fought with the noble Arabs of Harb, and his kinsmen the Beni Koreish, then Pagans at Beder Hunein, that Mahomet prayed to God, and a grove of balsam-trees grew up from the blood of the slain upon the field of battle; and, that with the balsam that flowed from them he touched the wounds even of those that were dead, and all those predestined to be good _Mussulmen_ afterwards, immediately came to life. “I hope, said I, friend, that the other things you told me of it, are fully as true as this, for they will otherwise laugh at me in England.” “No, no, says he, not half so true, nor a quarter so true, there is nothing in the world so certain as this.” But his looks, and his laughing very heartily, shewed me plainly he knew better, as indeed most of them do. In the evening, before we departed, about nine o’clock, I had an unexpected visit from the youngest of the two Agas; who, after many pretended complaints of sickness, and injunctions of secrecy, at last _modestly_ requested me to give him some _slow poison_, that might kill _his brother_, without suspicion, and after some time should elapse. I told him, such proposals were not to be made to a man like me; that all the gold, and all the silver in the world, would not engage me to poison the poorest vagrant in the street, supposing it never was to be suspected, or known but to my own heart. All he said, was, “Then your manners are not the _same_ as ours.”--I answered, dryly, “_Mine_, I thank God, are not,” and so we parted. Yambo, or at least the present town of that name, I found, by many observations of the sun and stars, to be in latitude 24° 3´ 35´´ north, and in long. 38° 16´ 3´´ east from the meridian of Greenwich. The barometer, at its highest, on the 23d of April, was 27° 8´, and, the lowest on the 27th, was 26° 11´. The thermometer, on the 24th of April, at two o’clock in the afternoon, stood at 91°, and the lowest was 66° in the morning of the 26th of same month. Yambo is reputed very unwholesome, but there were no epidemical diseases when I was there.