Arbor Maris

Plants animals and natural materials · A Chymical Dictionary

At a Glance

The word. Coral named through the image of a sea shrub.

A place to read. The historical definition below, 1650 dictionary, unnumbered definition page 6; facsimile PDF page 334.

Historical Definition

Arbor Maris is coral, which grows like a shrub in the sea.

Meaning

The entry supplies both a material identification and the resemblance behind its descriptive name. The shrub comparison concerns growth or form in the sea; it should not be silently converted into a modern biological classification. The historical account calls the substance coral.

This is a useful example of an image that the dictionary itself decodes. A reader encountering a sea-tree expression can first test the coral identification against the passage. It is more restrained to begin with that explicit explanation than to supply a broader symbolic meaning unsupported by the text.

Historical source: 1650 dictionary, unnumbered definition page 6; facsimile PDF page 334 — Facsimile

Sources. A Chymicall Dictionary (1650), s.v. Arbor Maris