FLORA OF MATHER AN AND MAHABL^SHWAR. 395 



these pages have been passing throngh the press, I have been indebted to 

 Mr. W. P. Symonds for some important additions to the Catalogue. Nor 

 can I forget the day when my faithful friend Yittu led me, with 

 much solemnity, to a tree in the jungle below Chowk plateau, not 

 many hundred yards from my own house, — a tree well known to 

 him and others, afflicted like him, in the monsoon months, with 

 dire, internal pains, which could only be cured by decoctions of 

 its bark. This was the Mahdruk or " the great tree," the wild 

 Cinnamon (Cinnamonum Tamala). It is striking and handsome, though 

 of no great size, with tufts, when first bursting into leaf, of small, 

 pale, pink, transparent leaves, which afterwards lengthen and become 

 pointed at both ends and have marked ribs or nerves, and are dark and 

 shining above, and when dried turn to a rich brown, and yield a sweet 

 spicy scent when crushed. I had never noticed it before, though I 

 must have passed near it a hundred times. Nor had Dr. Wellington 

 Gray ever noticed it, though he was a most enthusiastic searcher after 

 plants, to whom we in Bombay are indebted for some of the loveliest 

 of our garden plants, introduced by him during a long series of years. 

 I have found only four specimens of the cinnamon tree at Matheran 

 and none at Mahableshwar. It seeds freely, however, and can be 

 readily grown from seed ; and I hope it will some day be as familiar in 

 the public and private gardens of Bombay as many other trees of the 

 Konkan and the Dekhan and other parts of India have lately become. 

 Another notable tree (not before included in my lists), of which as yet 

 I have seen only one specimen at Matheran, is the Canarium strictwrij 

 which yields a balsam which is burnt as incense^ by some of the hill 

 people at their religious services and is in much request for this pur- 

 pose, and is allied to other balsamiferous trees which grow in profusion 

 on the Ghats traversed on the several routes to Mahableshwar. I have 

 often wondered how it came to plant itself in the thick wood near the 

 ehowki, far from its congeners and hemmed in by countless aliens. Its 

 position there is almost as remarkable as the isolated imprint of 

 Friday's foot on the sea shore, which so disconcerted that Prince of 

 Naturalists, Robinson Crusoe. 



It may be as well if I repeat here the reasons I gave in Vol. II for 



making a combined catalogue of the flora of Matheran and Mahablesh- 



"^ =5s^3,TheJiggetation of the two hills is not indeed identical. Dr. Cooke 



.^ 



