Sanguisuga). It would appear that the blood.
sucking quality of this useful little animal is a direct and exclusive ordination of Providence for man's advantage. That blood is not the natural food of the animal is probable from the fact that, in the streams and puols which they inhabit, not une in a hundred could in the common course of things ever indulge such an appetite; and even when received into the stomach, it does not appear to be digested; for though it will remain there for weeks without coagulating or becoming putrid, yet the animal usually dies, unless the blood be vomited through the mouth ' (Gosse's Zoo/off, ii. 374). Of course it is the smaller species, the Hirna'o 'Vedi c/war, that is here referred to. But the larger species, the Hawropsis sanguisaga, or 'hal:re-leech,' has a still greater voracity for blood. Bochart (Hieroz. 796-802), and Schultens (Prov. in /oc.), give another turn to Prov. xxx, 15, by identifying rip6) with the Arabic aia.a, and making fate or destiny, instead of the horse-leech, the insatiable exacter. The ancient versions, however, must be deemed to outweigh their learned speculations; 5 • added to which the Arabic the Syriac 1:00' , 'and the Chaldee and Talmudic ttf..931 or Nptbv., all desigriate the leech, which is as abun , .
dant in the East as it ever was in our Western countries. The blood-appetite of this animal made it suitable to point a proverb; Horace says, non missztro cutenz, nisi plena clitoris, hirudo (De Arte Poet, 476). With which compare Plautus, Epi dials 11. 2, 4, 5; and Cicero ad Atticum, lib. i. epist. 13. (3). The testaceous mollusk [ostrea marina, Gesenius Thes. 1263], called by the Hebrews 17',nt,z ; by Avicenna j.,„.7-) Wear glawan) ; by Galen eaXao-o-la Oopohpa* is the murex trunculus of zoology, from w2hich the renowned Tyrian dye nsed to be obtained. This shell-fish (and not the puride' extracted from it), is with good reason supposed by Gesenius to be referred to, in the Canticles vii. 5, 10.,;-, Inritc.' This in A. V. is the hair of thine heaa' •T,; like purple.' But in the view of Gesenius (which is favoured by the context, where the other points of comparison are derived froin palpable objects), it should run—in allusion to the convolute wreaths of the beautiful shell— The tresses of Mine head are like the wzrathed shell of the purple-fish ; reminding us of the ancient head-dresses of the Athenians, described by Thucydides, i. 6. 3; Xpuo-Cnt TETTI7LOV
evepo-a xpcepiXop civacnin.evo: 7-0,v 10 7-1) nopcaf: pEx6.4, (comp. the conical head-tuft of the Roinan Tilts/his [Varro, de ling. Latin. vii. 3. 9o], and Virgil's Crines noa'antur allruin). A second reference to this shell-fish probably occurs in Ezek.
xxvii. 7, where the prophet mentions Irne, nhn 4,Nn (A. V., Blue and putple. frvm Isles of Elishah'). The Tyrians seem to have imported some murices from the Peloponnesus (the same as 'Elishab' according to Heeren, Researches, Asthlic Nations [Oxford trans.], i. 361) ; and Gesenius supposes that these, the material out of which the celebrated dye was procured, are referred to by the prophet in his enumeration of the Tyrian merthandise. That these fishes were supplied from the coast of Greece we learn from Horace, Od. ii. 18. 7 (Laconica, purpurte); from Pausanias 21. 6; and from Pliny ix. 36. (For other coasts which yielded these fishes, see Winer B. R. W. ii. 2go, 29i. (4.) The other word used by Ezekiel in this passage, i-1.;171, is described by Gesenius, Thes. 1503, as 'a species of shell-fish (Conclolusin, Helix thnthine [conchap, found cleaving to the rocks in the Mediterranean Sea, covered with a violet shell (Forskal, Descript animal, p. 127), from which was procured a dark blue dye.' In the many other passages where these two words occur, they undoubtedly desig nate either the colours or the material dyed in them. The phrase, treasures hid in the sand,' Deut. xxxiii. 19, is supposed to refer to thc abun dance of the rich dyes afforded by the 1-b= and other testaceous animals found in the sand, on the Phoenician coast, assigned to Zebulon and Issachar. (Targum of Jonathan b. Uziel, Walton, iv. 387, and Gesenius, Thes.15o3). (5.) The mn (phir.