Hobson-Jobson: A Glossary of Colloquial Anglo-Indian Words and Phrases, and of Kindred Terms, Etymological, Historical, Geographical and Discursive c10.8999

c10.8999

MALABATHRUM, s. There can be very little doubt that this classical export from India was the dried leaf of various species of Cinnamomum, which leaf was known in Skt. as tamāla-pattra. Some who wrote soon after the Portuguese discoveries took, perhaps not unnaturally, the pān or betel-leaf for the malabathrum of the ancients; and this was maintained by Dean Vincent in his well-known work on the Commerce and Navigation of the Ancients, justifying this in part by the Ar. name of the betel, tambūl, which is taken from Skt. tāmbūla, betel; tāmbūla-pattra, betel-leaf. The tamāla-pattra, however, the produce of certain wild spp. of Cinnamomum, obtained both in the hills of Eastern Bengal and in the forests of Southern India, is still valued in India as a medicine and aromatic, though in no such degree as in ancient times, and it is usually known in domestic economy as tejpāt, or corruptly tezpāt, i.e. ‘pungent leaf.’ The leaf was in the Arabic Materia Medica under the name of sādhaj or sādhaji Hindī, as was till recently in the English Pharmacopœia as Folium indicum, which will still be found in Italian drug-shops. The matter is treated, with his usual lucidity and abundance of local knowledge, in the Colloquios of Garcia de Orta, of which we give a short extract. This was evidently unknown to Dean Vincent, as he repeats the very errors which Garcia dissipates. Garcia also notes that confusion of Malabathrum and Folium indicum with spikenard, which is traceable in Pliny as well as among the Arab pharmacologists. The ancients did no doubt apply the name Malabathrum to some other substance, an unguent or solid extract. Rheede, we may notice, mentions that in his time in Malabar, oils in high medical estimation were made from both leaves and root of the “wild cinnamon” of that coast, and that from the root of the same tree a camphor was extracted, having several of the properties of real camphor and more fragrance. (See a note by one of the present writers in Cathay, &c., pp. cxlv.-xlvi.) The name Cinnamon is properly confined to the tree of Ceylon (C. Zeylanicum). The other Cinnamoma are properly Cassia barks. [See Watt. Econ. Dict. ii. 317 seqq.]