Note 18 — Chapter I

“In the province of St. Jago, in Chili, there is a plant of this class and order (Didynamiæ gymnosperma) supposed to be a species of wild basil (Ocimum salinum), resembling the common basil so much as to be hardly distinguished from it, except that the flower stem is round and jointed, and its scent and taste not like the basil, but rather like the sea flag, or some marine plant. It is an annual, shooting forth in the spring, and continuing till the commencement of winter: every morning it is covered with hard and shining saline globules, resembling dew, which the countrymen shake off the leaves to serve them as common salt, and in some respects is thought to be of a superior quality. Every plant produces daily about half an ounce of this salt; but Molina, a scientific naturalist, to whom we are indebted for this information, says, that it is extremely difficult to account for this phenomenon, as the situation where he found these plants was in the most fertile part of the kingdom, and at a distance from the sea of more than seventy miles. When we see some plants secrete flint, separate and distinct from their fibres, as well as combined with their organic structure; and when we also know that plants secrete alkali, in every situation, I cannot perceive why Molina should consider the contiguity of the sea to be essential to the production of a neutral salt in the Ocimum salinum.” Linnæan System, London, 1816, vol. ii. p. 303.

Riley, whose narrative has recently appeared, saw in the desert, “A dwarf thorn bush from two to five feet high with succulent leaves strongly impregnated with salt.”