100 JOURNAL, BOMBAY NATURAL HISTORY SOCIETY, Vol. X 



small quantity of it for medical purposes. It is seldom if ever used 

 internally. It has a sweetish aromatic taste, partaking of the flavour 

 of the mature fruit ; and it goes under the name of " Kajuclii-Darur 



With regard to the nuts of the Cashew, I have come across some 

 very strange passages in a work on the Folklore of Plants by Eichard 

 Folkard. He says* that the nuts are supposed by the West Indians to 

 excite the passions. The later Hindu writers I have mentioned above 

 recognize some such property in general terms. *' The Negroes of the 

 West Indies say/' observes Folkard, " that a branch of the Cashew- 

 nut tree supplied the crown of thorns used at our Saviour's 

 crucifixion, and that, in consequence, one of the bright golden petals 

 of the flower became black and bloodstained." The spirit of profanity 

 " could no further go I" Well may I exclaim so. Judging from 

 the circumstance that the crucifixion of Christ occurred several 

 centuries before the plant was introduced into the Eastern tropics 

 from the Western World, and noting the stern botanical fact that 

 the flower of the Cashew-nut plant has neither '' a bright golden 

 petal " nor a black stain thereon, albeit the fact that its petals have 

 crimson streaks, call them " blood-stained " if you will, Folkard's refer- 

 ence must be taken to be an utter myth, the product of a fertile 

 but vitiated brain on the wrong side of the border-land of insanity. 

 The plant has luckily no thorns to have any such unhallowed claim 

 to have formed a part of the cruel and cursed "crown of thorns " that 

 touched the brow of a saintly being and superbly sacred person in 

 the last agonies of his earthly career. 



Madame Nooton mistakingly supposes that a resin is obtained from 

 the kernel. She is not a botanist, and is only writing from second- 

 hand information. But she evidently refers to the resin from the 

 pericarp. She is, however, right in saying that the resin " furnishes 

 a more efficacious vesicatory than the Spanish fly or cantharides." 

 But of this more later on. " The bark," says she, " contains a gum sold 

 in Europe under the name of ' Cashew,' which," she adds, " is said 

 to be a preservative against white ants." I think Madame Nooten 

 is rather " mixed up " here. For, as Kanny Lai Dey, of Calcutta, 

 says, it is the oleo-resin from the mesocarp that is applied to floors 

 and rafters of houses to prevent the attacks of white ants and other 



Plant Lore, Legends and Lyrics, p. 271, London, 1892, 



