The great interest attached to this plant arises from the beauty and durability of the wood, which, there is every reason to believe, was known to the ancients from the earliest times, under the name of Thuja. It is thus hypothetically, but probably correctly, identified with the θυῖον[3] of the Odyssey (ii. 6), with the θυῖον and θυία of Theophrastus (‘Hist. Pl.’ v. 5), and the thyine wood of the Revelations (xviii. 12). It is undoubtedly the Citrus wood of the Romans, and the Alerce of the Spaniards; the latter name being derived from the Moors of Marocco, for it is not a native of Spain.
The first botanical notice of the Callitris is in Shaw’s ‘Travels in Barbary,’ where it is figured and briefly described as Thuja articulata (462); and for its identification with the Alerce we are indebted to the late Mr. Drummond Hay when Consul of Tangier, who, further, sent a plank of the wood to the Royal Horticultural Society.[4] At about the same time, the attention of a most intelligent traveller, the late Capt. S. E. Cook (afterwards Widdrington), was attracted by the wood of the cathedral of Cordova (formerly a mosque built by the Moors in the ninth century) called Alerce, which differed from any Spanish wood, or any other wood now used in Spain. Coupling this name with the communication made by Mr. Drummond Hay to the Horticultural Society, Capt. Cook was enabled to identify the Cordova wood with the Callitris, which, as he assumes, was brought from Marocco, to roof a mosque intended to be second in sanctity only to that of Mecca.
Except in a garden at Tangier, we saw no specimen of the Callitris approaching a large size, or capable of yielding the beams which we were shown in the ceilings and roofs of buildings in that town and elsewhere, and which are considered to be indestructible. On the contrary, most of the native specimens we saw in Southern Marocco resembled small Cypresses, with very sparse foliage and branches, and were apparently shoots from the stumps of trees that had been cut or burnt down, though possibly their impoverished habit may have been due to the sterility of the soil. The largest were in the Ourika valley, and were about thirty feet high (see [p. 177]). In many cases the stem swelled out at the very base into a roundish mass half buried in soil, which is said to attain even four feet in diameter, though we saw none approaching that size.
It is the basal portion, whether the result of mutilation or natural growth, that affords the wood so prized by ancients and moderns, and which forms a most valuable article of export from Algiers to Paris, where small articles of furniture, &c., are made of it and sold at very high prices.
Under the name of Citrus wood, it is alluded to, according to Daubeny, by Martial and Lucan, and by Horace (‘Carm.’ lib. iv. Od. 1), who suggests its employment as the most precious commodity that could be selected for a temple in which a marble statue of Venus should be placed:—
Albanos, prope te, lacus
Ponet marmoream sub trabe citrea;
Also Petronius Arbiter, descanting upon the luxury of the Romans, seems to represent it as worth more than its weight in gold, when he says—
Ecce Afris eruta terris
Ponitur, ac maculis imitatur vilius aurum