Chemistry of Essential Oils

(Tuis.) #1

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.
Free download pdf