or Rosewood, in the materia medica; a wood, or root, chiefly brought to us from the Canary islands. The writers on botany and the materia medica are much divided about the lignum rhodium, not only with regard to the plant which affords it, but likewise in their accounts of the drug itself, and have described, under this name, simples manifestly different. This confusion seems to have arisen from an opinion, that the rhodium, and the aspalathus (an article of considerable esteem among the ancients, but with regard to which the moderns are very much at a loss), are the same; whence different woods brought into Europe for the unknown aspalathus, were sold again by the name of rhodium.

In those modern pharmacopoeias which admit the lignum rhodium, different Linnean names are at present given to it: thus the authors of the Dispensatorium Brunsvicensis suppose it to be the Rhodiola rofa of Linnaeus; and those of the Pharmacopoeia Rossica, the Genista Canariensis. As to Aspalathus, the ancients themselves disagree; Dioscorides meaning by this appellation the wood of a certain shrub freed from the bark, and Galen the bark of a root. At present we have nothing under this name in the shops. What was heretofore sold among us as aspalathus, were pieces of a pale-coloured wood brought from the East Indies, and more commonly called calambour.

The aspalathus, calambour, and lignum aquile, are supposed to be woods of the nature of agallochum, or lignum aloes, but weaker in quality. The lignum rhodium of the shops is usually in long crooked pieces, full of knots, which when cut appear of a yellow colour like box, with a reddish cast: the largest, smoothest, most compact, and deepest coloured pieces, should be chosen; and the small, thin, or pale ones, rejected. The taste of this wood is lightly bitterish, and somewhat pungent; its smell is very fragrant, resembling that of roses: long kept, it seems to lose its smell; but on cutting, or rubbing one piece against the other, it smells as well as at first. Distilled with water, it yields an odoriferous essential oil, in very small quantity. Rhodium is at present in esteem only upon account of its oil, which is employed as an high and agreeable perfume in scenting pomatums and the like. But if we may reason from analogy, this odoriferous simple might be advantageously applied to more useful purposes; a tincture of it in rectified spirit of wine, which contains in small volume the virtue of a considerable deal of the wood, bids fair to prove a serviceable cordial, not inferior perhaps to any thing of this kind.

LIGNUM Campechense. See Hematoxylum.

LIGNUM Colubrinum. See Ophiorhiza.