Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 15.djvu/653

Rh M A S M A S 621 service, the hiring is considered as a general hiring, and in point of law a hiring fora year.&quot; But &quot;in the case of domestic and menial servants there is a well-known rule, founded solely on custom, that their contract of service may be determined at any time by giving a month s warn ing or paying a month s wages, but a domestic or other yearly servant, wrongfully quitting his master s service, forfeits all claim to wages for that part of the current year during which he has served, and cannot claim the sum to which his wages would have amounted had he kept his contract, merely deducting therefrom one month s wages. Domestic servants have a right by custom to leave their situations at any time on payment of a calendar month s wages in advance, just as a master may discharge them in a similar manner &quot; (Manley Smith s Law of Master and Servant, chaps, ii. andiii.). The master s right to chastise a servant for dereliction of duty (which appears to be still recognized in some American cases) is no longer sustained in English law, unless perhaps in the case of servants under age, to whom the master stands in loco parentis. The following are assigned by Manley Smith as in general sufficient grounds for discharging a servant : (1) wilful disobedience of any lawful order ; (2) gross moral mis conduct; (3) habitual negligence; (4) incompetence or permanent disability caused by illness. A. master has a right of action against any person who deprives him of the services of his servant, by enticing him away, harbouring or detaining him after notice, con fining or disabling him, or by seducing his female servant. Indeed the ordinary and only available action for seduc tion in English law is in form a claim by a parent for the loss of his daughter s services. The death of either master or servant in general puts an end to the contract. A servant wrongfully discharged may either treat the contract as rescinded and sue for services actually rendered, or he may bring a special action for damages for the breach. A master is bound to provide food (but apparently not medical attendance) for a servant living under his roof, and wilful breach of duty in that respect is a misdemeanour under 24 & 25 Viet. c. 100. A servant has no right to demand &quot; a character &quot; from an employer, and if a character be given it will be deemed a privileged communication, so that the master will not be liable thereon to the servant unless it be false and malicious. A master by knowingly giving a false character of a servant to an intending employer may render himself liable should the servant for example rob or injure his new master. For penalties incurred by personating masters and giving false certificates of character, or by persons offering themselves as servants with false or forged certificates, see 32 Geo. III. c. 56. Reference may be made to the article on LABOUR AND LABOUR L.vws for the cases in which special terms have been introduced into contracts of service by statute (e.g., Truck Act), and for the recent legislation on the subject generally, including the Employers Liability Act, 1880. The master s liability on the contracts of his servant depends on altogether different principles from those on which his liability for negligence has been justified. It is substantially a case of liability as principal for the acts of an agent. The main question in all cases is whether the alleged agent had authority to make a contract for his principal, and in the relation of master and servant there may be any variety of circumstances giving rise to that presumption. Here the rights of third persons have to be considered, and the master will be held liable to them wherever he has &quot; by words, con duct, or demeanour held out his servant as a general agent, whether in all kinds of business or in transacting business of a particular kind,&quot; even if the servant should act contrary to express orders. For example, a horse-dealer sending his servant to market with a horse to sell will be liable on the servant s warranty, although he has been positively ordered not to warrant ; whereas an owner sending a stranger to sell would not be liable on a warranty given contrary to express directions. MASTIC, or MASTICH, a resinous exudation obtained from the lentisk, Pistada Lentiscus, an evergreen shrub of the natural order Anacardiacex. The lentisk or mastic plant is indigenous to the Mediterranean coast region from Syria to Spain, but grows also in Portugal, Morocco, and the Canaries. Although experiments have proved that excel lent mastic might be obtained in other islands in the archi pelago, the production of the drug has been, since the time of Dioscorides, almost exclusively confined to the island of Scio. The mastic districts of that island are for the most part flat and stony, with little hills and few streams. The shrubs are about 6 feet high. The resin is contained in the bark and not in the wood, and in order to obtain it numerous vertical incisions are made, during June, July, and August, in the stem and chief branches. The resin speedily exudes and hardens into roundish or oval tears, which are collected, after about fifteen days, by women and children, in little baskets lined with w 7 hite paper or cotton wool. The ground around the trees is kept hard and clean, and flat pieces of stone are often laid beneath them to prevent any droppings of resin from becoming contaminated with dirt. The collection is repeated three or four times between June and September, a fine tree being found to yield about 8 or 10 K) of mastic during the season. Besides that obtained from the &quot;incisions, mastic of very fine quality spontaneously exudes from the small branches. The harvest is affected by showers of rain during the period of collection, and the trees are much injured by frost, which is, however, of rare occurrence in the districts where they grow. Four qualities of mastic are recognized by the dealers in Scio. 1. Cake, consisting of large pieces, sold chiefly for use in the seraglios, being chewed by women of all ranks throughout the Turkish empire, for the purpose of imparting an agreeable odour to the breath. This quality is worth 120 to 130 piastres per oke (of 2 83 ft) or even more. 2. Large tears, worth 90 to 100 piastres. 3. Small tears, valued at 75 to 80 piastres. 4. Mastic mixed with fragments of leaves and sand, chiefly con sumed in the manufacture of the Turkish liqueur, or mastic brandy, called raki, and other cordials. The third sort, in small tears, is that which is chiefly exported to England, the first and second qualities being sent to Turkey, especially Constantinople, also to Trieste, Vienna, and Marseilles. These varieties are known to the dealers as KvXia-ro, tyKiffKapi, jrrJTra, and &amp;lt;A.oC5a respectively. Mastic still forms the principal revenue of Scio. In 1871, 28,000 K&amp;gt; of picked and 42,000 ft of common were exported from that island, the former being worth 6s. lOd. and the latter 2s. lOd. per ft. The average price in London varies from 2s. 6d. to 4s. 6d. per ft. During the 15th, 16th, and 17th centuries mastic enjoyed a high reputation as a medicine, and formed an ingredient in a large num ber of medical compounds, but its use in medicine is now almost obsolete. Mastic occurs in English commerce in the form of roundish tears about the size of peas, some of them, however, being oblong or pear-shaped. They are transparent, with a glassy fracture, of a pale yellow or faint greenish tinge, which darkens slowly by age. When chewed they rapidly soften, by which character they are easily distinguished from Sandarac resin, which while bearing a strong resemblance to mastic occurs in tears of a more cylindrical shape. The mastic which has been imported of late years presents a bright glassy appearance from having been washed free from dust. Mastic is soluble in turpentine, chloroform, ether, acetone, and oil of cloves ; but cold alcohol dissolves only 90 per cent, of it. The soluble portion is called Alpha resin (C 20 H 32 3 ), and possesses acid properties. The insoluble portion, Beta resin or Masticin, is somewhat less rich in oxygen, and is a translucent colourless tough substance insoluble in caustic alkali. Pistacia Khinjuk, Stocks, and P. calulica, St., trees growing throughout Sindh, Baluchistan, and Cabul, yield a kind of mastic which is met with in the Indian bazaars under the name of Mustagi- riimt, i.e., Roman mastic. This when met with in the European market is known as East Indian or Bombay mastic. In Algeria P. atlantica, Desf., yields a solid resin, which is collected and used by the Arabs as a masticatory. Cape mastic, used by the colonists, but not exported to England, is the produce of Euryops multifidus, the resin bush, or harpuis bosch, of the Boers, a plant of the com posite order growing abundantly in the Clanwilliam District. Dammar resin is sometimes sold under the name of mastic. The West Indian mastic tree is the Burscra gummifera, and the Peru vian mastic is Schimis Molle; but neither of these furnishes com mercial resins.