JACK'S LETTERS TO WALLICH, 1819-1821. 183 



trouble of my commissions, of which I shall bow avail nryself 

 without mercy. 



You will by this have considerably exceeded the amount of my 

 former remittance, therefore I now enclose a draft on the Treasury 

 for Sa E 300. On receiving the cash will you be good enough to 

 desire Messrs. Gibson & Co, Tailors, to send you a small bill which 

 I owe them for a suit of clothes which I had just before leaving 

 Calcutta, and at same time order a genteel blue coat, of no non- 

 sensical dandy fashion, but such as a gentleman may put on ? Pray 

 send it at convenient opportunity, together with the books and 

 atlas, which you were so good as to take charge of. As I may 

 consider myself fixed here for some time, I may as well collect my 

 rattle traps about me. 



Pray is any acknowledgement of the honour necessary to the 

 Asiatic Society to which your good offices have procured me ad- 

 mission. I find from my account " Curr." that Mr. Calder has 

 done the needful in regard to payment which I suppose is the 

 most essential part of the acknowledgement. Now in regard to 

 your wish for a paper, pray tell me when they are likely, to bring 

 forth a vol. 124 Something or other they must have, but what, may 

 be regulated by the probable delays. If they are not likely to 

 publish soon, something of minor interest will do, for instance 

 ellucidations of some imperfectly known Rumphian or Malay trees 

 and fruits, as the Bachang, Eambutan, Eambeh, etc. etc. A per- 

 fect Clavis Eumphianus is rather a desideratum. Do you know 

 anything of the Easamala of Eumph? 125 His description makes 

 it a Pinus. Here they have a Easamala, which is different and is 

 more like a Guttifera. There are here a great many kinds of 

 wild nutmegs, which will be interesting and which I must in- 

 vestigate. I think I mentioned to you at Penang my having ob- 

 served the true Xutmeg to be polvgamus. I find the observation 

 confirmed here, in so much that the planters trouble themselves 



124. The Asiatic Society produced the thirteenth volume of the 

 AsiaticJc Besearclies in 1820, and the fourteenth in 1822: but Jack was 

 not among the contributors. The fifteenth volume appeared in 1825. In 

 a later letter he writes to Wallich ' ' I think you told me that there were 

 two volumes in hand or in the press. ' ' Possibly he thought the manuscript 

 closed, which cannot have been the case as Hardwicke 's paper on the 

 Singapore zoophyte went into the fourteenth. 



125. Easamala to Eumpf was a wood — ' ' Ca ju Easamala ' ' — which was 

 brought to Amboyna from New Guinea, from a country of barbarians, 

 and its origin was only to be- investigated by hearsay. At a much later 

 date, the botanists who worked in Java, e.g. Blume who was Jack's con- 

 temporary, Noronha, Hasskarl, and Junghuhn, showed that one kind of 

 Easamala is the resin of the forest-tree, Altingia excelsa, Noronha, — not 

 one of the Guttiferge as Jack suggests, but of the Hamamelidaceae. How- 

 ever apparently not all rasamala is from tlrs tree. Easamala in commerce 

 has been much confused with Eosan alias or Liquid storax from the Levant. 



R. A. Soc, No. 73, 1916. 



