158 COSMOS. 



More certain knowledge was now transmitted to the West 

 from the Macedonian colonies respecting those Indian products 

 of nature and art which had hitherto been only imperfectly 

 known from commercial intercourse, or from the narrations 

 of Ctesias of Cnidus, who lived seventeen years at the court 

 of Persia as physician to Artaxerxes Mnemon. Among the 

 objects thus made known we must reckon irrigated rice-fields, 

 for whose cultivation Aristobulus gives special directions ; the 

 ootton-tree, and the fine tissues and the paper for which it* 

 furnished the materials ; spices and opium ; wine made from 

 rice and the juice of palms, whose Sanscrit name of tala has 

 been preserved in the works of Arrian ;t sugar from the sugar- 

 cane,! which is certainly often confounded in the Greek and 

 Roman writers with the tabaschir of the bamboo reed ; wool 

 from the great Bombax-tree ;§ shawls made of the Thibetian 

 goat's hair; silken (Seric) tissues ;|| oil from the white sesa- 

 mum (Sanscrit tila) ; attar of roses and other perfumes ; lac 

 (Sanscrit Idkschd, in the vulgar tongue lakkha) ;*}[ and, last- 

 ly, the hardened Indian wutz-steel. 



Besides the knowledge of these products, which soon be- 

 came objects of universal commerce, and many of which were 

 transported by the Sekucidse to Arabia,** the aspect of a rich- 



1829, 8. 150; Droyseii, Bildung des Hellenist. Staatensystems, s. 614.) 

 I write Paropauisus, as it occurs in all the good codices of Ptolemy, 

 and not Paropamisus. I have explained the reasons in my Asie Centrale, 

 t. i., p. 114-118. (See, also, Lassen, zur Gesch. der Griechischen und 

 Indoskythischen Konige, s. 128). * Strabo, lib. xv., p. 717, Casaub. 



t Tala, the name of the palm Borassus flabelliformis, which is very 

 characteristically termed by Amarasinha " a king of the grasses." Ar- 

 rian, Ind., vii., 3. 



X The word tabaschir is deduced from the Sanscrit tvakkschird (bark 

 milk). In 1817, in the historical additions to my work De distribn- 

 iione Geographicd Plantarum, secundum cckH, temperiem et altitudinem 

 Montinm, p. 215, I drew attention to the fact that the companions of 

 Alexander learned to know the true sugar of the sugar-cane of the In- 

 dians as well as the tabaschir of the bamboo. (Strabo, lib. xv., p. 693 ; 

 Peripl. Maris Erythr., p. 9.) Moses of Chorene, who lived in the mid- 

 dle of the fifth century, was the first (G^eog'r., ed. Whiston, 1736, p. 364) 

 who circumstantially described the preparation of sugar from the juice 

 of the Saccharum officinarum, in the province of Chorasan. 



$ Strabo, lib. xv., p. 694. 



11 Ritter, Erdkunde von Asien, bd. iv., 1, s. 437; bd. vi., 1, s. 698; 

 Lassen, Ind. Alterthumskunde, bd. i., s. 317-323. The passage in Aris- 

 totle's Hist, di Animal., v. 17 (t. i., p. 209, ed. Schneider), relating to 

 the web of a great horned caterpillar, refers to the island of Cos. 



^ Thus Xa/c/cof ;^pwyudrtvof in the Peripl. Maris Erythr., p. 5 (Las 

 gen, s. 316). 



** Plin., Hist. Nat., xvi., 32. (On the introduction of rare Asiatic 

 plants into Egypt by *.he Ptolemies, see Pliny, xii., 14 and 17.) 



