692 BURMA, ITS PEOPLE AXD PRODUCTIONS. 



weed by a very simple process ; but Mr. O'Riley was tbe fii'st to make a good article 

 from it, and to bring it to public notice. He made more tban a hundred pounds, 

 and the specimens ■vrhich he sent to Calcutta were reported : ' In its refined form 

 it is identical in all its properties with Chinese camphor.' The plant is so abundant 

 that Burma might supply half the world with camphor. Wherever the trees arc 

 cut down, this weed springs up, and often to the exclusion of almost everything 

 else ; so that an old clearing looks like a field under cultivation." The apparatus 

 required for the distillation of camphor is extremely simple, consisting simply of 

 a capacioiis vessel wherein the material containing the camphor, cut up and mixed 

 with water, is boiled, and a head, consisting of one or more pots, to receive the 

 products of distillation, and which, being kept cool by means of wet cloths, receive 

 the crude camphor deposited during the process of condensation. A redistillation 

 by dry heat of the crude camphor, produced by the first process, is all that is 

 reijuired to produce the refined article. 



EXTADA SEEDS (Page 540). 



The seeds of the Enttida are used for playing the game gohn-nyin-toh-pwe, so 

 popular and universal in Burma, and which is ec^ually popular, as we learn from 

 Capt. Lewin,' among the wild tribes of the Chittagong Hills. The game resembles 

 ' nine-pins ' in miniature. The lai'ge flatfish seeds are stuck up on end, and a player 

 fires at them \\\\\i another seed, projected by drawing back, with a flip, the middle 

 finger of the right hand. The party bowling over most seeds wins. 



PEXTACilE SIAMEXSIS (Page 629). 



This is the tree which the Burmese believe to be the one which has been petrified 

 and scattered so plentifully over many parts of Pegu, and the petrified wood is there- 

 fore called Enjyn clioulc. They believe when a tree reaches maturity and dies it 

 becomes petrified, especially if immersed in water, and this nonsense is believed by 

 many Europeans, and even receives a sort of y(((7«i'-confirmation by the solemn recogni- 

 tion of it in l)r. Balfour's work,'' who writes : " It is said to harden by exposure to 

 watei', and even to strike fire with steel after having been kept in water a length of 

 time." It is to be hoped this passage will be in future editions expunged, and 

 committed to the limlio wliere similar ciuiosities fiud their last home. 



' llill Tracts of Chittagong, p. 40. - liah'our's ' Timber Trees,' vinder Shunu lolusta. 



