LAUEACE^ 133
for distillation, and also form the chief material from which the oil is
distilled in England. The oil distilled in Ceylon is usually obtained by
macerating the fragments of bark in sea-water or strong brine for two
or three days and then subjecting them to distillation. The yield is
from
- 5 to 1 per cent. The majority of that exported, however, is not
genuine. Either the leaves are added to the bark when distilled, or
cinnamon leaf oil is added to the oil after distillation. The important
difference between the two oils is that the bark oil owes its characteristic
odour to the cinnamic aldehyde it contains, whilst the leaf oil contains
only traces of that body; the chief constituent of the latter oil is eugenol,
the characteristic phenol of the oils of cloves and pimento.
The more delicate odour of cinnamon oil causes it to be preferred
to cassia oil in England, whilst the stronger and coarser odour of the
latter, together with its much lower price, gains for it preference in
many parts of the continent.
In ancient literature there appear many references to cinnamon,
but as these do not appear to mean the cinnamon bark as we know it
to-day, and the latter is so largely a British product, the following in-
teresting details, due to E. M. Holmes,^1 may be quoted :—
" Some kind of spice, bearing the name of cinnamon, appears to have
been known from the earliest times, but it was apparently not the Ceylon
cinnamon of the present day, since, according to Tennent (Ceylon,
1859, p. 575) 'in the pages of no author from the earliest ages to the
close of the thirteenth century is there the remotest allusion to cinna-
mon as an indigenous production or even as an article of commerce in
Ceylon'. Hanbury (Pharmacographia, second edition, p. 521) re-
gards the cinnamon of the ancients as the bark now known as Chinese
cassia, and the cassia of the ancients as perhaps one of the thicker and
less aromatic barks of the same group, such as are still found in com-
merce.
" Although cinnamon seems to have been the first spice sought after
in all the Oriental voyages in ancient times, and although both cinnamon
and cassia are mentioned by Theophrastus, Herodotus, Galen, Dios-
corides, Pliny, Strabo, and many other ancient writers on plant products,
it is evident that the barks distinguished by those names were extremely
analogous, since Galen remarks that the finest cassia differs so little
from the lowest quality of cinnamon that the first may be substituted
for the second provided a double weight of it be used. That there was
a distinct difference in flavour of the barks called cinnamon and cassia
recognised by ancient writers is quite clear.
".In 1511 Barbose distinguished the fine cinnamon of Ceylon from
the inferior Canella trista of Malabar (' Canella' being the Portuguese
name for cinnamon). About fifty years later Garcia D'Orta stated that
Ceylon cinnamon was forty times as dear as that of Malabar, and in
1571 he saw branches of the tree at Bristol, in Holland. Cinnamon
was then cut from trees growing wild in the forests in the interior of
Ceylon, the bark being exacted as tribute from the Kings of Ceylon by
the Portuguese. The bark appears to have been collected by the Chalias,
a peculiar caste, who are said to have emigrated from India to Ceylon
in the twelfth century, and who possibly brought the knowledge of the
value of the tree with them from the Malabar coast; in aftertimes they
JP. and E.O.R. (1916), 41.