for apothecary and apprentice, shall we also find cassia used for acacia.[177] Unfortunately, however, this corruption of acacia into cassia has not always been confined to the illiterate:  but the long employment of the corrupted form has at length introduced it, in some instances, among a few of our writers.  Even the venerable Oliver, although well acquainted with the symbolism of the acacia, and having written most learnedly upon it, has, at times, allowed himself to use the objectionable corruption, unwittingly influenced, in all probability, by the too frequent adoption of the latter word in the English lodges.  In America, but few Masons fall into the error of speaking of the Cassia.  The proper teaching of the Acacia is here well understood.[178]

The cassia of the ancients was, in fact, an ignoble plant having no mystic meaning and no sacred character, and was never elevated to a higher function than that of being united, as Virgil informs us, with other odorous herbs in the formation of a garland:—­

“...violets pale, The poppy’s flush, and dill which scents the gale, Cassia, and hyacinth, and daffodil, With yellow marigold the chaplet fill.” [179]

Alston says that the “Cassia lignea of the ancients was the larger branches of the cinnamon tree, cut off with their bark and sent together to the druggists; their Cassia fistula, or Syrinx, was the same cinnamon in the bark only;” but Ruaeus says that it also sometimes denoted the lavender, and sometimes the rosemary.

In Scripture the cassia is only three times mentioned,[180] twice as the translation of the Hebrew word kiddak, and once as the rendering of ketzioth, but always as referring to an aromatic plant which formed a constituent portion of some perfume.  There is, indeed, strong reason for believing that the cassia is only another name for a coarser preparation of cinnamon, and it is also to be remarked that it did not grow in Palestine, but was imported from the East.

The acacia, on the contrary, was esteemed a sacred tree.  It is the acacia vera of Tournefort, and the mimosa nilotica of Linnaeus.  It grew abundantly in the vicinity of Jerusalem,[181] where it is still to be found, and is familiar to us all, in its modern uses at least, as the tree from which the gum arabic of commerce is obtained.

The acacia, which, in Scripture, is always called shittah[182] and in the plural shittim, was esteemed a sacred wood among the Hebrews.  Of it Moses was ordered to make the tabernacle, the ark of the covenant, the table for the showbread, and the rest of the sacred furniture.  Isaiah, in recounting the promises of God’s mercy to the Israelites on their return from the captivity, tells them, that, among other things, he will plant in the wilderness, for their relief and refreshment, the cedar, the acacia (or, as it is rendered in our common version, the shittah), the fir, and other trees.