or Camphire, a solid concrete juice extracted from the wood and roots of the laurus camphora, which grows in Japan. The camphor is extracted in the same way by which we extract essential oils. As it first sublimes from the wood, it appears brownish, composed of semipellucid grains mixed with dirt. In this state it is exported by the Dutch, and purified by a second sublimation; after which it is reduced to loaves, probably by fusion in clothe vessels, and in this form it is sold to us. Pure camphor is very white, pellucid, somewhat unctuous to the touch; of a bitterish, aromatic, acrid taste, yet accompanied with a sense of coolness. It has a fragrant smell, somewhat like that of rosemary, but much stronger. It is totally volatile and inflammable; soluble in vinous spirits, oils, and mineral acids; but not in water, alkaline liquors, or the vegetable acids. Camphor is esteemed one of the most efficacious diaphoretics, and has long been celebrated in fevers, malignant and epidemical distempers. In deliria, where opiates fail of procuring sleep, this medicine frequently succeeds.

Artificial Camphor is prepared with gum-sandarach and white vinegar distilled, kept twenty days in horseradung, and afterwards exposed a month to the sun to dry, at the end of which the camphor is found in form of the crust of a white loaf. This is also called juniper-gum, and mastic.

Camphor-tree. See Laurus.

Camphorata, in botany. See Polycnemum.