CUMIN, or Cummin(Cuminum Cyminum), is an annual, umbelliferous, herbaceous plant, indigenous to Upper Egypt, but early cultivated in Arabia, India, and China, and in the countries bordering the Mediterranean. Its stem is slender and branching, and about a foot in height; the leaves are multifid, with filiform segments; the flowers are small and white. The fruits or achenes, the so-called seeds, which constitute the cumin of pharmacy, are fusiform or ovoid in shape, and compressed laterally; they are two lines long, are hotter to the taste, lighter in colour, and larger than caraway seeds, and have on each half nine fine ridges, overlying as many oil-channels or vittae. Their strong aromatic smell and warm bitterish taste are due to the presence of about three per cent, of an essential oil. The tissue of the seeds contains a fatty oil, with resin, mucilage and gum, malates, and albuminous matter; and in the pericarp there is much tannin. The volatile oil of cumin, which may be separated by distillation of the seed with water, is mainly a mixture of cymol or cymene, C 10 H 14 , and cuminic aldehyde,C β H 4 (C 3 H 7 )COH. Cumin is mentioned in Isaiah xxviii. 25, 27, and Matthew xxiii. 23, and in the works of Hippocrates and Dioscorides. From Pliny we learn that the ancients took the ground seed medicinally with bread, water, or wine, and that it was accounted the best of condiments as a remedy for squeamishness. It was found to occasion pallor of the face, whence the expression of Horace, exsangue cuminum (Epist. i. 19), and that of Persius, pallentis grana cumini (Sat. v. 55). Pliny relates the story that it was employed by the followers of Porcius Latro, the celebrated rhetorician, in order to produce a complexion such as bespeaks application to study (xx. 57). In the ...