TACHARDIA 



LACCA 



History 



Close Connection 

 with India. 



THE LAC INSECT 



Dye and. 

 Resin. 



European 

 Travellers. 



Arab Writers. 



Red- dye Wood. 



Cancamum. 



Dicdacca. 



Vedic description the golden, the odorous, the hairy one, sister of the waters, 

 etc. might easily be viewed as appellations of Idkahd (Jtntea fronaoen) and 

 indicative of its appearance, structure and habitat frequenting as it does the 

 margins of water-channels and creeks. But a vast antiquity being thus estab- 

 lished for the Indian knowledge of lakh, it is surprising that it finds no definite 

 place in the ancient classic literature of Greece, Rome, Egypt, Persia and Africa. 

 All the passages which, according to some dictionaries, are taken to denote a 

 knowledge in lac, refer to a red-dye-yielding wood, or to kermes or to a resin at 

 present unknown, but do not denote Indian lac. That substance was made 

 known to Europe through the Arab traders, hence its being often called 

 " Arabian " or " Ethiopian Resin." If it was known to the ancient Greeks, 

 their knowledge of it could not have much preceded the date of their discovery 

 of India itself. 



Lac yields two distinct products a DYE and a RESIN. At first these were 

 confused, but ultimately clearly and separately recognised. In the Periplus 

 (written somewhere about 80 A.D.) " lakkos chromatinos " or lac-dye is mentioned 

 as conveyed from India to Aduli on the African coast of the Red Sea. ^Elian 

 (Nat. Hist. Anim., 250 A.D., iv., 46) describes lac as made in India from insects 

 and employed as a red dye. Pegolotti (Delia Decima, 1343, iii., 365) speaks of 

 " lacca " as Indian, produced on branches of trees. Nicolo Conti and also Niki- 

 tin (in the 15th century) mention, as if an important commercial product, the 

 "laca" of Cambay. Varthema (Travels, 1510 (ed. Hakl. Soc.), 222, 238) discusses 

 the " lacca " of Pegu, also the " lacca " wood of the Malay. The former is the 

 true lac, the latter a red-coloured wood exported from Sumatra (Crawford, Diet. 

 2nd. Islands, 1856, 204). Garcia de Orta was perhaps the first European, however, 

 who critically examined and described lac in India, and he gives the properties and 

 uses of both the dye and the resin in such detail that the passage might be quoted 

 as from the pen of a 20th instead of 16th century writer. As physician to the 

 Portuguese Governor of India, he visited that country in 1534. His volume of 

 Colloquies was published at Goa in 1563 and was the second book printed in India. 

 He there (Coll., xxix ; also in Ball, Proc. Roy. Ir. Acad., 3rd ser., i., 414) criticises 

 the accounts given by Isaac (a physician of Bhagdad, who was crucified in 799 A.D. ), 

 by Serapion (who lived about 850), and by Avicenna (whose works are assigned to 

 980-1036). These early Arab writers, Garcia tells us, called it " laca," " luc," etc. , 

 but confused it with the cancamum (the resin known to the Greeks to which 

 reference is made below) and ultimately with the dye kermes of the Greeks. 

 They were in error, he observes, in regarding it as an Arabian or Armenian product 

 a circumstance which Garcia very rightly accounts for by the Indian supply on 

 reaching the Red Sea and Persian Gulf ports being subsequently designated by 

 the name of the port from which procured. Many writers confused a red-dye 

 wood, such as logwood or sappan-wood, with lac, and one of these red-dye woods, 

 as just mentioned, actually bears the Malay name of laka. Gaspar (Purchas* 

 Pilgrimes, iii., 177) alludes apparently to the same wood under the name cayolagne 

 ( ? kayu = wood and lakh). If this be so it is possible it was so named because 

 employed as a substitute for the true lac-dye. " Lac " and " lacquar " wood and 

 dye are words frequently mentioned, when there is nothing to show that they 

 denoted Indian lac resin or dye as understood to-day. Every passage that 

 contains the word " lac " cannot therefore be accepted as of necessity denoting 

 the lakh of modern Indian commerce. 



Linschoten and most European travellers in India, subsequent to Varthema 

 and Garcia, content themselves with compiling from the latter, without adding 

 anything of value as the result of personal observation. Some few years previous 

 to the appearance of Garcia's Colloquies, however, an interesting passage on lac 

 had been published by Amatus Lusitanus (1553) in his Commentary on Dioscorides 

 (book i., ch. 23, 44), the passage regarding cancamum. Amatus there repudiates 

 all idea of lac being the classic gum of the Greeks, whatever that may have been. 

 He then adds that lac was being brought from India by the Spaniards to be used 

 as a dye and also in the fabrication of the Arabian medicinal preparation known 

 as dialacca. We next hear of lac through Mathiolus (1565), who in his com- 

 mentary on the cancamum of Dioscorides, tells us that lac was being largely used 

 by the Italians as a silk dye called lacca or lachetta, the best quality of which was 

 iii the trade designated lacca sumetri. By Clusius (1567-1605, compiling largely 

 from Acosta (Tract, de las Drogas, 1578, 113) and other subsequent writers, we 

 are told that it had become customary for lac to be consigned from Pegu to 

 Sumatra in exchange for pepper, hence its being designated Sumatran Lac. 



1054 



