OPIUM. 



43 



About the year 77 of the same century, Dioscorides' plainly distin- 

 guished the juice of the capsules under the name of Siro^ from an 

 extract of the entire plant, /uijKeopeiov, which ho regarded as^ much less 

 active. He described exactly how the capsules should be incised, the 

 performing of whicli operation he designated by the verb oiri^eiv. We 

 may infer from these statements of Dioscorides that the collection ot 

 opium was at that early period a branch of industry in Asia Elinor. 

 TJie same authority alludes to the adulteration of the drug with the 



iicium 



Pliny^ devotes some space to an account of Opion, of which he 

 describes the medicinal use. The drug is repeatedly mentioned as 

 Lacrima papaveria by Celsus in the 1st century, and more or less 

 particularly by numerous later Latin authors. During the classical 

 poriod of the Roman Empire as well as in the early middle ages, the 

 only sort of opium known was that of Asia Minor, 



'The use of the drug was transmitted by the Arabs to the nations of 

 the East, and in the first instance to the Persians. From the Greek 



^fy 



its Avay into many Asiatic languages.^ 



The introduction of opium into India seems to have been connected 

 with the spread of Islamism, and may have been favoured by the 

 Mahommedan prohibition of wine. The earliest mention of it^ as a 

 production of that country occurs in the travels of Barbosa* who visited 

 CaUcut on the Malabar coast in 1511. Among the more valuable drugs 

 the prices of which he quotes, opium occupies a prominent phice. It 



was either imnorted trom 



being the cheaper, yet worth three or four times as much as camphor 



or benzoin. 



Pyres' in his letter about Indian drugs to Manuel, king of Portugal, 

 written from Cochin in 1516, speaks of the oj^ium of Egypt, that of 

 Cumbay and of the kingdom of Coiis (Kus Bahar, S.W. of Bhotan) in 

 Bengal. He adds that it is a great article of merchandize in these 

 parts and fetches a good price ; — that the kings and lords eat of it, 

 and even the common people, though not so much because it costs 

 dear. 



Garcia dOrta® informs us that the opium of Cambay in the middle 

 of the 16th century was chiefly collected in Mahva, and that it is soft 

 and yellowish. That from Aden and other places near the Erythrean 

 Sea is black and hard. A superior kind was imported from Cairo, 

 agreeing as Garcia supposed with the opium of the ancient Thebaid, a 

 district of Upper Egypt near the modern Karnak and Luksor. 



In India the Mogul Government uniformly sold the opium monopoly, 



^ Lib. iv. c. 65. » Joiirn. de Soc. Pharm. Lus'd. ii. (1S3S) ^Cu 



Lib, XX. c. 76. Pirea, or Pyres, was the first ainbassador 



*There are no ancient Chinese or Sanskrit from Europe to China: Abel Remusat, 



^^^^^^ ^or opium. In the former language Nouv. milangcs asiatiq7iP.-% ii. (1829) 203. 



^e drug ia ooXl^^O^fu-yunfj from the Arabic. See also Pedro Jos^ da Silva, Eloijio histovKO 



J- wo other names Ya-pien and 0-piai are e notkia compkfa de Thom^. Pires, pharma- 



^ptationa to the Chinese idiom of our word ceutico e primnro naturaUda da Lnlxn, 



opiuau There are several other designa- Lisboa, 1866 (Library of the Phann. Soc, 



lions which may be translated iS7noil7*«yrf2r«, London, Pamphlets, No. 30). , 



^ or agn poison, Black commodity, &c, ^Aromatum , . . Historia, edit Clusius, 



LoasU of East Africa and Malabar Antv, 1574. lib. i. c. 4, 

 makluytSoc.). Lond. 1866. 206. 22.1. 



