Book Description

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1919 edition. Excerpt: ... in a cultivated state, and does not even succeed well, the fruit being mediocre and acid.1 There is no ancient Sanskrit name for the tree; nor does it play any rdle in the folk-lore of India, as it does in China. Further, as regards the time of the introduction, whether the reign of Kaniska be placed in the first century before or after our era, it is singularly synchronous with the transplantation of the tree into western Asia. 5. As indicated by the Persian name dar-llni or dar-iin ("Chinese wood" or "bark"; Arabic dar fini), cinnamon was obtained by the Persians and Arabs from China.2 Ibn Khordadzbeh, who wrote between A.d. 844 and 848, is the first Arabic author who enumerates cinnamon among the products exported from China.3 The Chinese export cannot have assumed large dimensions: it is not alluded to in Chinese records, Cao 2u-kwa is reticent about it.4 Ceylon was always the main seat of cinnamon production, and the tree (Cinnamomum zeylanicum) is a native of the Ceylon forests.6 The bark of this tree is also called dar-clm. It is well known that cassia and cinnamon are mentioned by classical authors, and have given rise to many sensational speculations as to the origin of the cinnamon of the ancients. Herodotus6 places cinnamon in Arabia, and tells a wondrous story as to how it is gathered. Theophrastus7 seeks the home of cassia and cinnamomum, together with frankincense and myrrh, in the Arabian peninsula about Saba, Hadramyt, Kitibaina, and Mamali. Strabo3 locates it in the land of the Sabaeans, in Arabia, also in Ethiopia and southern India; finally he has a "cinnamon-bearing country" at the end of the habitable countries of the south, on the shore of the Indian ocean.9 Pliny10has cinnamomum or cinnamum grow in the country of...