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What is the seed of a modern standard?

By Chelsie Vandaveer

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St. John's bread (Ceratonia siliqua Linnaeus) [sair a toh' nee a sil' i qwa] is an evergreen tree native to the eastern Mediterranean. The wood is hard, close-grained, and prized for woodworking. Typical of its family, the Fabaceae, St. John's bread produces a pod with hard, brown, bean-like seeds.

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The pods have long been part of the diet of livestock and a famine food in the Middle East. The fallen ripe pods were gathered and fed to pigs and cattle. It is believed that these were the "husks that the swine did eat" with which the prodigal son "filled his belly". Most scholars since the time of John Gerard (1500s) also consider the pods as the 'locusts' eaten by John the Baptist. Locust still refers to a number of trees related to St. John's bread, species within the genera of Parkia, Robinia, Gleditsia and Hymenaea.

The pods were known in Arabic and Persian as qirat from which we derived its modern name, carob, and use as a chocolate substitute. As words were handed down in history, qirat became applied as the name of the seed.

Carob seeds are not eaten, but for the ancients provided another use—a measure of value. The reliability in the size and weight of the seeds became the ancient standard of quality. A qirat (or karat) was equal to a scruple. A scruple was one twenty-fourth of a troy ounce; consequently, an ounce of pure gold was 24 karat.

The weight of the qirat was also used for precious stones, but with gems the modern spelling became carat. The Castilians in Spain adopted the Arabic standard and passed it to the jewelers in Paris, London and Amsterdam.

And yet seeds are seeds and do vary, however slightly, from tree to tree and year to year. Finally the gem syndicates settled on a metric equivalent, 200 milligrams, for the weight of a carat. Still, a one qirat gem from an ancient bazaar was probably not much different in weight to a stone from a modern jeweler.

The Botanical Garden of the University of California, Los Angeles has posted a photograph of carob pods and seeds. To view the photograph, click on the link:

Click here to view the photograph

The Dipartimento di Botanica, Università di Catania has posted a photograph of Ceratonia siliqua with green pods. To view a photograph of the pods on the carob tree, click the link:

http://www.dipbot.unict.it/orto/0179-1.html

(Compiled from: "Carob, Ceratonia siliqua", Fruits of Warm Climates, Julia F. Morton, 1987, published on the internet by Horticulture and Landscape Architecture, Purdue University; Luke 15: 11-32 (KJV); and "Carat, karat", The Century Dictionary, 1889, published to the internet by Global Language Resources, Lizard Tech (AT&T Labs))

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Wollemi Pine

National Geographic®

Exclusively from National Geographic, this survivor from the age of the dinosaurs is one of the greatest living fossils discovered in the 20th century. The Wollemi pine is one of the world's oldest and rarest tree species, belonging to a 200-million-year-old plant family thought to have been extinct for more than two million years. Previously known only from fossil records, it was presumed extinct until a single tree was found in the Wollemi National Park, Australia, in 1994. Subsequent research discovered 100 adult trees that have survived in a single canyon in this wild and rugged area. Click here to view canyon, trees and fossil record.

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In association with National Geographic, Novica today serves as an online arts agent for more than 1,700 artists in countries around the world. Visitors to the Novica Web site can read about the artists, explore their cultures, view photographs of their work and select from more than 8,500 handcrafted works.

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