In this country, as I should think must happen in China, the attention is fixed on the most trivial things; or, rather, the importance appears of things held to be trivial. One feels in contact with the world in its infancy; as if, by stretching forth the hand, you could reach the source of the earliest inventions for supplying our wants, or gratifying our desires. I can only compare it to a museum of antiquities, whether in what they wear; what they do; the houses they inhabit; the names they bear; or the words they speak;—all is as it was of old. Here, too, are the rudiments of what we find in other forms elsewhere. What can be more striking than to be called, as I was myself to-day, a Nazarene! the first title applied to the Apostles by the Jews.
By the exclusion of atmospheric air, the most delicate flower may be handed down to future ages. Here a similar process seems to have been applied to man: the cause of change is excluded in the one case—change itself in the other: elsewhere, letters graven upon brass and marble, are our guides through the evolution of ages; but here man himself is the undying and unchangeable record of himself.
This morning I was watching a Negress who rejoiced in the Punic name of Barca, washing and cooking in the court below. Her extreme and minute cleanliness suggested the question: “In what could cleanliness have consisted before the discovery of soap?” Soap comes next to absolute necessaries. What must have been the condition of nations without either soap or the bath? What a benefit to the human race the discovery of either;—where neither was known, filth would be as habitual as clothing: there could be nothing clean or unclean. The use of the bath must then have made that difference between one people and another, that exists between filthy and cleanly animals, altering their very nature. Yet I could not tell when it was discovered, or who were the inventors. Why should it alone be without honour, or parentage? Whence its name?[237] Our word is from the Latin, but soap has no Latin etymon. The name is not derived from the Greek; it has, in that language, no corresponding term. The modern Greeks use the same—either their soap has travelled eastward since the decline of the Roman Empire, or it belongs to the East at an earlier time. In this dilemma I apply to Barca, and at once obtain the solution. Soap, in Arabic, is Saboon. They have the verb, Sabeïn, which does not mean to ‘soap,’ but, to ‘wash.’ The Arabs did not adopt the name from Rome, and coin out of it a verb for so primitive a usage as washing.
The Moors possessed soap made to their hands, measured by mountains, and cheaper than manure. This substance is decomposed flints, or soap-stone: it is called Gazule, or Razule; it polishes the skin, makes it soft, and gives it lustre. It abounds on the river Seboo, and may, when exported, have got that name abroad. It is not fit for washing clothes, for which purpose they have a primitive soft soap like that of the ancient Celts—this is what they call Saboun. The first mention made of it is amongst the Gauls. The Romans had so little acquaintance with it in Pliny’s time, that he thought it was used for the purpose of turning the hair red. It is no trifling honour to the Gaulish race, looked upon as barbarous, that the Romans should have taken from them beds and mattresses, jewellery, and soap. “Soap,” says Pliny, “is an invention of the Gauls to colour the head yellow: it is made of tallow and ashes. The best which they make is of beech wood ashes and goat’s suet, and it is made in two ways, either thick and hard, or liquid and soft; but the one, as well as the other, is very much used in Germany; and a great deal more indeed by men than women.”[238]
Great ingenuity was exerted in discovering and applying various kinds of earths and solvents to clean the body and the clothes, as may be followed at length in Pliny; but yet the best mixture at which they seem to have arrived, is that which was used in Greece, of which the preparation is described by Aristophanes in the Frogs—a composition[239] of ashes, nitre and crinoline earth. The Romans, like the French at present, lessieved their dirty linen.[240]
FOOTNOTES:
[236] Another vessel was also off the port twice, and twice driven back to Gibraltar.
[237] Beckman derives it from an old German word sepe. The German word is at present seife, evidently the same as the French suif, and the English suet.
[238] Nat. Hist. b. 28.
[239] Bochart imagines that the Phœnicians had given the name to the island, Gum-ohal, signifying “fossa smegmatis.” It was found in Thessaly, Lycia, Sardis and Umbria. Avicenna calls it Al Siraph, from a town on the Persian gulf. Dioscorides says, gall prepared with nitre and earth of Cineola, is the best detergent. The ancients knew the saponaceous root with which in India shawls and muslins are washed, and which the Persians, Turks, and Arabs, use for the hair, and otherwise where great delicacy is required. It was from a Persian word called Asleg, by the Arabs Condus, by the Greeks στρούθιον, whence στρουθιζειν. Pliny calls it (Nat. His. l. xix. c. 3), “radiculam et herbam lanariam.” The detersives used by the ancients were various, but were nearly the same as those in present use among the Mahometans. They were called by the general name of smegmata. A common detersive was bean meal, which the Romans called lomentum, and a paste from lupine flour. Galen (De Aliment. Facul. i.) says, “Cutis sordes fabacea farina manifestè deterget,” (bean flour certainly takes off filth from the skin), on which account procuresses and dainty women anciently made great use of it: they smeared it on the face, and it was said to remove freckles and pimples. Dioscorides goes so far as to assert that it will render cicatrices of a uniform colour with the rest of the skin. It stops the blackness arising from blows. Lomentum will take away wrinkles, if we are to believe Martial (l. iv.)