By the Arabs it is said to be called tufalt-al sheitan, or devil's apple. If we look to the works of more modern authors, we find a continuance of the same statements. Thus Mariti, in his Travels (vol. ii. p. 195), says that the Arabs called the mandrake plant yabrochals, which is, no doubt, the same name as given above. At the village of St. John in the mountains, about six miles south west from Jerusalem, this plant is found at present, as well as in Tuscany. It grows low, like lettuce, to which its leaves have a strong resemblance, except that they have a dark green colour. The flowers are purple, and the root is for the most part forked. The fruit, when ripe, in the beginning of May, is of the size and colour of a small apple, exceedingly ruddy, and of a most agreeable odour ; our guide thought us fools for suspecting it to be unwholesome. He ate it freely himself, and it is generally valued by the inhabitants as exhilarating their spirits and a provocative to venery.' Maun drell was informed by the chief priest of the Samaritans that it was still noted for its genial virtue. Hasselquist also seems inclined to consider it the dudaim, for, when at Nazareth, it says, what I found most remarkable in their villages was the great quantity of mandrakes that grew in a vale below it. The fruit was now (May 16) ripe.
From the season in which this mandrake blossoms and ripens its fruit, one might form a conjecture that it is Rachel's dudainz. These were brought her in the wheat harvest, which in Galilee is in the month of May, about this time, and the mandrake was now in fruit.' Considering therefore that the earliest translators have given mandragora and Yabrokhint as the synonymous names for dudaim, and that the root and fruits of atropa mandragora have, from early times, been supposed to be possessed of the same properties which are ascribed to the dudaim, there does not appear to us any other plant, which has been yet adduced, better entitled than it to stand for the dudaim. But there does not exist sufficient collateral proof to confirm the selection by the Greek translator of the mandragora as the dudaim, in preference to some other plants, which might be adduced, and to which similar properties have from ancient times been ascribed.—J. F. R.